Articles & Texticles

Fifth Avenue Bridge, Drypoint, 1928

MARTIN LEWIS, printmaker. 1883-1962

OK, so he wasn’t strictly a painter, because the majority of his work was printmaking, but he did paint too, as you will see.

I can’t remember how I stumbled on Martin Lewis’s work, but I do remember being immediately impressed by his handling of tonality. The more I looked at his work the more I was struck by the use of light over dark / dark over light, and his bold, almost industrial strength tonal compositions.

You quickly get a feeling that Lewis was really close to his human subjects, and felt a sort of matey parity with them.

A few pictures to get a sense of the man and his work. (These are not sorted by date or any other formal system!) Titles under the thumbnails.

Bedford Street Gang Drypoint and sand ground, 1935

The Orator 1916

Shadows, Garage at Night Drypoint, 1928

Spring Night, Greenwich Village Drypoint, 1930
(Some delicious detail in this one)

Suburban Evening Drypoint, 1925

Subway Steps Drypoint, 1930

The Great Shadow Drypoint, 1925

Above The Tracks, Weehawken
Now see the reverse view worked in colour:-

Railroad Yards, Winter - Weehawken

And here to round out this crop of pictures, an almost abstract composition.
Originally it was titled Black Magic - Gashouse District

Now it’s called: Shadow Magic

Ive put a couple of quoted bios below the fold, but this liitle detail from somewhere stuck in my mind:

He taught his friend, the great American Realist artist, Edward Hopper, to etch.

Martin Lewis was born in Castlemaine, Australia, in 1881. After running away from home at the age of fifteen, he studied briefly at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney.
This was his only formal training. He immigrated to the United States around 1900, and worked for a time in San Francisco.

Eventually, he settled in New York City, which was to be his home for the rest of his life, except for the few years during the Depression, when he left the city to live in western Connecticut.

Early on, Lewis supported himself as a commercial artist. He was thirty-four when he issued his first prints. Entirely self-taught, he relied on contemporary published manuals for instruction. He did not begin distributing or exhibiting his prints seriously until 1927, when he was given his first exhibit at the Kennedy Galleries. He received immediate critical acclaim, and enjoyed considerable success for the next ten years.

Except as a teacher at the Arts Student League between 1944 and 1951, Lewis received little attention after the depression. He died in relative obscurity in 1962.
Since his death, Lewis has come to be recognized as one of the leading American printmakers, and his works can be found in some of the finest collections in the world. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Library of Congress are among the many important institutions which have his work, in addition to the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden and the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Martin Lewis was born on June 7, 1881 in Castlemaine, Australia. He was the second of eight children and he had a passion for drawing. At the age of fifteen he left home and traveled in New South Wales and New Zealand, working as a posthole digger and a merchant seaman before settling in a Bohemian community outside of Sidney. He studied at the Art Society’s School and had several drawings published in the local newspaper. In 1900 he visited his family in Castlemaine for the last time and left for the United States.

His first known job in the United States was painting stage decorations for the McKinley Presidential Campaign of 1900. Little is known of his early years in this country; however, by 1909 he was living and working in New York City.

Martin Lewis produced his first known print in 1915 and was active in the writers and artists’ communities of the time. The important changing point in his career was when he went to live in Japan during the early 1920s. While there, he spent his time drawing, painting and studying Japanese art, returning to New York in 1921. His next group of etchings and drypoints were of Japanese subjects. A number were reproduced in the Times during this period.

Martin Lewis became famous a few years later for his images of New York City. Starting in 1927 many memorable images were created, including “Relics”, “Rain on Murray Hill”, “Glow of the City”, “Shadow Dance” and “Stoops in the Snow.” “Relics”, produced in 1928 was well received by the public and the edition was sold out in a few months.

Today, his prints are eagerly sought after by collectors. Many are quite rare and hard to locate.

I’ll no doubt post some more work from this master of light and dark.
It seems tragic that he should have died in obscurity, and I’d like to keep a small candle burning for him here, more than 40 years after his death.