Lockwood's career is the story of an American painter who refused a single regional or stylistic identity, Kansas farm boy, Pennsylvania Academy student, Parisian post-Impressionist, Taos modernist, federal muralist, university art-department builder, San Francisco abstractionist, and whose paintings carry the imprint of every one of those settings.
The Pennsylvania Academy training under McCarter introduced Lockwood to Cézanne at a moment when most American academic teaching was still oriented around the late nineteenth-century French Salon tradition, and the encounter set the structural foundation of his subsequent painting. The 1917 enlistment took him to France for the first time; his 1921 return for an extended stay in Paris, with studio time in Montmartre and classes at the Ranson, deepened his exposure to the broader post-Impressionist tradition and to the work of Van Gogh, whose handling and colour would mark his paintings for years afterward.
The Taos move was the central artistic decision of his early career. The eleven years he spent there placed him within the modernist circle that included Marin, Dasburg, and Adams, painters who were turning the New Mexican subject toward a Cézannean and Cubist-inflected handling rather than toward the more illustrative tradition of the original Taos Society. His Taos landscapes and figural compositions belong to the most formally ambitious work being made in the colony at the time.
The federal mural programs of the New Deal era gave him a parallel public-art career. The commissions across Kansas, New Mexico, Washington, Kentucky, and Texas placed his work in the daily life of small American towns and federal buildings, and the murals translated his easel-painting vocabulary of regional subject and modernist construction into a public, civic register. The Taos County Courthouse murals, painted in the early years of the program, are among the most important examples of New Deal mural work in the Southwest.
His parallel academic career began with the University of Texas appointment. The art department he organized there during the next decade, hiring younger artists, expanding the curriculum into graphic arts and mural painting alongside the core disciplines, became one of the most consequential institutional projects of his career, and his subsequent move to Berkeley extended that institutional influence to the West Coast. The wartime Army service interrupted but did not end the teaching career.
The San Francisco years also opened a final stylistic phase. Working between Berkeley teaching and his own studio, Lockwood experimented with abstraction and assemblage in ways that integrated the modernist threads of his earlier career with the postwar developments around the Bay Area. He retired from Berkeley in 1961 and returned to Taos, where he died two years later. His correspondence, diaries, sketchbooks, and mural-project material are held in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.