East Side Night, Williamsburg Bridge

Although Martin Lewis had some artistic training in his native Australia and worked in New York as a commercial illustrator, as an etcher he was self-taught. His first etching in 1915 demonstrated such proficiency that his friend and fellow artist Edward Hopper solicited Lewis’s instruction in the technique, which both men felt was uniquely suited to capturing the pulse of the city. Lewis later became friendly with another New York transplant, Armin Landeck, with whom he opened a "School for Printmakers" in 1934. Lewis’s New York etchings seize on random, isolated encounters, less narrative than emblematic in their glimpses of urban life: a woman hanging out her stockings, or an evening rendezvous outside a corner speakeasy. In East Side Night, Williamsburg Bridge, a man stands with his back to us outside a men’s room on an elevated bridge as a woman leaves the scene at lower left. The sign for the men’s room, in both English and German, is a trace of the crowded immigrant streets of New York’s Lower East Side.