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Lot Essay
By 1909, Martin Lewis had arrived in the United States and taken up residence in New York City, where he quickly established ties with the new generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals such as Edward Hopper, William Carlos Williams, and John Sloan. Like his contemporaries, Lewis first took-up graphic art as a means of to support himself while he honed his skills as a creative artist and printmaker. After briefly abandoning New York, he returned to the city and became associated with Kennedy & Company, which was one of the foremost galleries in the United States at the time and led the commercial boom in American prints. By 1929, the gallery hosted a one-man exhibition of Lewis’ work that included 55 etchings and several oils and watercolors. The show proved a critical and financial success.
A hallmark of Lewis’ prints was the use of tonalities to evoke atmosphere and light. In works such as Passing Freight and Trumbull Street, he created scenes of damp drizzling evenings with light dancing on the pavement. In East Side Night, Williamsburg Bridge, and Chance Meeting, Lewis used his technical bravura to evoke the dramatic lighting that would later be seen in the film noir of the following decades. Such tonal qualities stood in stark contrast to Lewis’ American contemporaries. Edward Hopper approached printmaking with keen draftsmanship, but he did not experiment with techniques like aquatint or sand ground to suggest atmosphere. Similarly, John Sloan’s etching style approached whimsical caricature. In Night Windows, Sloan used cartoonish figures in domestic settings to instill humor into a vulgar street scene.
A hallmark of Lewis’ prints was the use of tonalities to evoke atmosphere and light. In works such as Passing Freight and Trumbull Street, he created scenes of damp drizzling evenings with light dancing on the pavement. In East Side Night, Williamsburg Bridge, and Chance Meeting, Lewis used his technical bravura to evoke the dramatic lighting that would later be seen in the film noir of the following decades. Such tonal qualities stood in stark contrast to Lewis’ American contemporaries. Edward Hopper approached printmaking with keen draftsmanship, but he did not experiment with techniques like aquatint or sand ground to suggest atmosphere. Similarly, John Sloan’s etching style approached whimsical caricature. In Night Windows, Sloan used cartoonish figures in domestic settings to instill humor into a vulgar street scene.