Painter Jack Lubin, born in New York in 1907, might be best known as an abstract-style muralist.
Two murals this WPA artist painted in a garment district building were removed by developers in 2011, and a mural he completed in 1956 in the Statler Hotel in Dallas was rediscovered and restored in 2012.
In 1938, he painted this magical nocturne of an elevated train in a noir-ish nighttime New York, capturing the yellow light from inside the train and apartment windows, as well as the blue glow of the sky in a Manhattan that even on a moonless night never goes black.
The painting looks like a dream—what I wouldn’t do to travel back into that scene and experience the screeching and rumbling of an elevated train gliding three stories over the sleepy city!
[Painting: Smithsonian American Art Museum]
