Roszak, the Polish born, American vanguard sculptor began his career as a painter, studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1920s. His travels in Europe from 1929-31 exposed him to the avant-garde movements of the time and upon return his work entered a mature phase marked by the first constructions, three dimensional works executed in various metals. His paintings of this period clearly reflected the same concerns. His use of photograms - which were not exhibited during his lifetime - is consistent with the images created in other media. In Theodore Roszak: Constructivist Works, 1931-1947 (Hirschl & Adler Galleries, February 29 - April 11, 1992, exhibition catalogue) Douglas Dreishpoon writes: The photograms Roszak made between about 1937 and 1941 occupy a special place in his production. ...[But] the photograms represent his investigation of photography as an experimental medium. Although he probably did not see the influential Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, he did purchase Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold's Foto-Auge, 76 Fotos der Zeit (1929) and Moholy-Nagy's Malerei, Fotografie, Film (1925) which reproduced examples of photograms and lauded their potential as works of art. ...In the photograms, forms hover between darkness and light, suspended in time and space. Roszak saw space as a metaphor for the last frontier and a realm for the projection of imagination and myth. The photograms embody a dreamlike, spatial dimension in which Constuctivism and biomorphism assume their most poetic and ethereal incarnations.