Landès Lewitin Painted With Legends But Few Know His Name

Unlike his contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Lower East Side artist Landès Lewitin has been largely forgotten—except among the art cognoscenti. Lewitin’s bold outré works, however, have marked him as chief among the circle of pivotal mid-century artists and thinkers. That includes his standing as a charter member of The Club, founded in 1949 in Greenwich Village, a tight group of the era’s most influential painters and thinkers.

Lewitin’s Great-Nephews Inherited The Bulk Of His Work

Lewitin’s cross-cultural style—Egyptian-born and French-trained with a solid career in the U.S.—has found new interest. In 2019, his great-nephews Albert and Lawrence Lewitinn (their surnames are spelled differently than the artist’s) inherited about 1,000 of the artist’s works. While no retrospective museum exhibit of his creations is in the making, some of Lewitin’s works were recently mounted in Jacaranda, a Los Angeles restaurant on Melrose Avenue.

“The feel of Landès’ work is that of someone somewhat misunderstood, a man who saw the world in an unique way,” said Sarah Lewitinn, sister to Albert and Lawrence Lewitinn, and Landès Lewitin’s great-niece. Sarah Lewitinn and her husband, chef Daniel Patterson, own Jacaranda, which opened in May 2026. Eight of Lewitin’s works are displayed there, on loan from Lewitinn’s brothers.

Lewitin’s ‘Mystifying Calligraphy’

Sarah Lewitinn noted the “mid-century vibe” inherent in her great uncle’s works, what the New York Times, in its 1966 obituary of the artist, called his “personal symbolic language that he never explained.” Lewitin covered his canvases with a “mystifying calligraphy” and was keenly interested in color.

Sarah Lewitinn previously worked as an American music executive, known for being a power player in the indie rock boom of the early 2000s. Patterson is a James Beard award-winning chef; his flagship San Francisco restaurant Coi, launched in 2006, earned two Michelin stars.

When considering Jacaranda’s design, Sarah Lewitinn and Patterson turned to Preen, Inc., a Los Angeles-based hospitality design firm. Preen recently captured a spot on the 2026 Prix Versailles “World’s 16 Most Beautiful Restaurants” list with Lucia, an Afro-Caribbean restaurant it designed in Los Angeles.

Preen founder Alexis Readinger helped the couple choose and place the Lewitin artworks, designing an art rail and lighting that wraps around corner walls. “Sarah and Daniel had been doing their Jaca Social Club in their living room the previous year (a pop-up in-home dining experience), so they wanted guests to feel that same intimacy and social connection—the Lewitin works really helped with that,” said Readinger in an interview.

Personal Artworks Work Well In Modern Hospitality Design

Rather than reading as a museum display, the Lewitin paintings look casually placed in the best sense—some hung and some leaning on the art rail. “It conveys a sense of a dinner party at someone’s home,” Readinger said.

Readinger’s overall design concept for the 30-seat Jacaranda referenced the Jacaranda tree, known for its vivid purple blooms. The restaurant’s ceiling includes a “canopy” design—four large suspended shapes that allude to Jacaranda leaves.

The surrounding design shows off the Lewitin works, referencing bold colors, which the artist favored. A sawtooth ceiling is covered in a russet woven canvas, with banquettes picking up the same earthy hue. White drapes frame the space, with a front window wall tinted Jacaranda-purple, visible from the outside. And yes, there’s a mature Jacaranda tree that grows on the boulevard just outside the eatery.

As a design concept, personal artworks read well in today’s hospitality design environment, but it wasn’t always that way when Readinger got her start in 2000. Her first gig was with Dodd Mitchell, “the hottest restaurant designer in Los Angeles,” according to a 2003 Los Angeles Times article.

The first project Readinger managed for Mitchell was Katana, its walls “covered with hundreds of heavy black railroad spikes,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“Today, diners want experimental immersive spaces, but they don’t want the attention to be on anything complicated,” said Readinger.” They want the focus to be on their experience, along with a sense of comfort, and for the space to be warm and inclusive.”

Among Sarah Lewitinn’s favorites of her great-uncle’s works in Jacaranda is “Shepherd and Guardsman” (1954), depicting two abstract figures set against a golden-yellow background. “The vibrancy of the yellow is just spectacular,” she said. “The work is super-textural so it almost looks like embroidery.”

What’s Next For Landès Lewitin?

New York City’s Museum of Modern Art has two of Lewitin’s paintings in its permanent collection. The museum exhibited his work in the 1940s and 1960s. A more recent 2010-2011 exhibit included him among New York Abstract Expressionist painters.

The Lewitinn family is looking to future generations, along with AI, to spread knowledge of Lewitin’s work. Lawrence Lewitinn is building an AI-native archive for his great-uncle’s works, which will systematize the artist’s sketches, pigment formulas, poems and color diagrams, along with his notes on color, perception and theory.

For example, Lewitinn’s AI system can use the artist’s notation about color and pull in related subjects, including 19th-century optics, pigment chemistry and de Kooning’s studio methods, Lewitinn writes in a recent LinkedIn post.

AI can scan brushstrokes and colors to group works, read handwriting in old journals and suggest metadata tags, among other tasks.

Lawrence Lewitin has also set up the non-profit Landès Lewitin Foundation, “to support preservation, digitization and scholarly access,” he writes. To further Landes Lewitin’s legacy, Lewitinn hopes the AI-assisted program will give the art world “a working example of what AI-native archival scholarship looks like.”