In the late 1920s Micheal Loew was enrolled at the Art Student’s League and later was in France where he studied with Fernand Leger. Loew was close and longtime friends with Wilem de Kooning who influenced his work.
After Pearl Harbor, Loew joined the Navy and served as the battalion artist for the “Seabees” in the Pacific. His watercolors were drawn largely from his Navy work on Tinian Island. When he returned home in 1946, his painting moved quickly toward Abstraction.
It was the 1950s that brought the full development of his mature style. He studied with Hans Hoffman and cultivated his sensibility for color effects. He used the grid-structure of Piet Mondrian as a base to experiment with possibilities of palette and to focus on the subtle transitions of tone or harmony of color relationships. He changed subjects into unique patterns of rectangles or color. As a major proponent of Abstract Expressionism and later Color Field painting, Loew produced many colorful examples, such as as Blue Edge and Yellow on Yellow.
Over the course of his life, Loew’s work was exhibited extensively in galleries and museums including: The Guggenheim and The Whitney in NY, the Dallas Museum of Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.