Martin Lewis titled this drypoint etching Arch, Midnight. The people under the arch don’t look like they’re up to much good.
He reportedly considered two alternate titles, “Archway, Midnight” and “The Arch Over the Street, Astoria.”
Does anyone know where exactly this dark, shadowy underpass is in Astoria, and if it still exists?
Martin Lewis created this shadowy etching of an ordinary Village street in 1930. According to Artnet.com:
“At the time Lewis made Spring Night, Greenwich Village he lived at 111 Bedford Street (which may be the street depicted in the print), in the Village, and was immersed in the intellectual and artistic life of the neighborhood.”
“His exhibit at Kennedy Galleries in 1929 had been a great success, and he discontinued the commercial art work he had been doing.
“But of course the Great Depression changed everything; Lewis and his wife gave up their house in the Village and moved to Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
“He set up a short-lived printmaking school in the Village in 1934 (with Armin Landeck and the printmaker George Miller), and moved back to the Village in 1936.”
This drypoint etching by William C. McNulty—described as a “romantic-realist” in a 1963 obituary in The New York Times—depicts an industrial city under stormy skies.
Australian-born artist Martin Lewis casts a magical glow on an otherwise gritty city scene of laundry, fire escapes, and tenements.
That’s the Chanin Building, an Art Deco skyscraper on 42nd Street, the woman is gazing at dreamily.
It’s just one of Lewis’ many drypoint etchings that capture New York street life in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ephemeral New York 