Lowell Nesbitt

(American, 1933–1993)

Lowell Nesbitt was an American painter and printmaker best known for his large-scale depictions of flowers. These frontal paintings of irises, lilies, tulips, orchids, and roses, isolated the flower from space, pressing them against a monochromatic or patterned background. Though grouped into the Photorealist movement, Nesbitt’s stylization of objects was more akin to the works of Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist. Born on October 4, 1933 in Baltimore, MD, he studied at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In 1958, the Baltimore Museum of Art hosted his first solo show. By 1962, the artist who had mostly worked with abstraction began introducing subject matter to his paintings, including piles of shoes, dogs, empty studios, and building facades. Moving to a massive studio space in Manhattan in 1976, Nesbitt began producing works up to 30 feet long. In 1989, the artist who had promised to gift the Corcoran Gallery of Art $1.5 million after his death, renounced his bequest after the museum infamously cancelled his friend Robert Mapplethorpe’s solo exhibition. Nesbitt later gave the $1.5 million endowment to the Phillips Collection. The artist died on July 8, 1993 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.