East River Drive

Armin Landeck planned a career as an architect, but after the crash of 1929, there were few job opportunities in the depressed building market. Committing himself to printmaking instead, he translated his love of architecture into etchings of New York’s skyscrapers and tenements. As print historian James Laver noted, "The nineteenth-century etcher tended to be recruited from the ranks of oil and water-color painters; the twentieth century etcher seems to begin life, with significant frequency, as an architect. … The influence of the architects, attracted to etching as their most convenient expression, has undoubtedly tended to harden the outlines of the art." Landeck, finding this hardened line particularly appropriate for the writing of urban existence, captured the spirit of New York almost exclusively through the structures that were its visible fabric. In this still-life study of giant cylinders and rectangles—traces of the Cubism he had seen and admired in Paris as a young man—Landeck reveals formal beauty in an otherwise bleak view of the modern city.