lowbrow
日本の芸術作品の美しさに魅了されてしまったアメリカの建築家がいました。
Frank Lloyd Wright Credited Japan for His All-American Aesthetic
Produced by pressing a dozen or more carved, differently colored cherry-wood blocks onto a single sheet of paper, the prints were considered a lowbrow popular art form in Japan.
But they had been “discovered” by avant garde European artists in the 1870s, and this sparked a craze known as Japonisme that eventually reached the United States a few years later.
Wright, like Fenollosa, felt that “the Japanese print is an organic thing,” and his 1912 book on the subject, “The Japanese Print: An Interpretation,” was really a general treatise on aesthetics based largely on Fenollosa’s ideas.
Wright’s favorite Japanese print artist, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), had published sketches illustrating how the subtleties of living forms could be constructed from simple mechanical shapes, and Wright based his own “organic” architectural plans on similarly overlapping geometric modules – a radical notion at a time when planning was typically based on axes and grids.
（一部抜粋）
今回はlowbrow （browの発音は/‐brὰʊ/）を取り上げます。
Oxford Dictionary of English(Second Edition Reserved, Oxford University Press)によると、 “not highly intellectual or cultured”とのことでした。
『ジーニアス英和辞典』（第五版，大修館）で調べたところ、「無教養な，低俗趣味の」と載っておりました。
以上から文中の “the prints were considered a lowbrow popular art”は「芸術価値のないものとみなされていた」のような意味で使用されているかと思います。
ちなみに反対語がhighbrow、その中間がmiddlebrowとなり、それぞれ「知的な，教養のある」、「（趣味・教養が）そこそこの」という意味を持ちます。（Gomez）
lowbrow 復習 - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心：言葉の森から
