Our Featured Painting:
Street Scene-Evening, New York City
by Martin Lewis
Martin Lewis made the streets, architecture and people of New York City the primary component of his art. Indeed, Lewis arrived in Manhattan during the early 1900s, at a time when the painters of the Ashcan School––among them Robert Henri and John Sloan––were creating portrayals of America’s premiere metropolis in a bold realist manner that went hand in hand with the energy and bustle of the city. Inspired by their example, and no doubt aware, as well, of the writings of Theodore Dreiser and O. Henry, who explored aspects of New York life in their novels and short stories, Lewis also focused his creative energies on portraying the urban panorama. However unlike some painters, who used their art as a means to comment on the social conditions of the lower immigrant classes, or others, whose paintings celebrated the city’s famous streets, skyscrapers and monuments, Lewis’s took a different approach: guided by his interest in pictorial matters relative to light and form and by his subjective response to city spaces, he created works of art in which he melded the distinctive qualities of ordinary New Yorkers and the everyday architecture that surrounded them.

Many of Lewis’s paintings and prints feature nocturnal views of New York, the artist taking great delight in the many moods of the city at night and in the aesthetic potential of its lights and darks. His work in this vein includes numerous depictions of working girls out for a night on the town, including the present example, in which some smartly dressed young women stroll nonchalantly along a deserted sidewalk. Adorned in stylish suits and matching hats, the figures are shown walking by an empty lot, their shapes silhouetted against a shadowy backdrop of single-story buildings that are in turn flanked by a line of moonlit tenement buildings seen against the night sky; this is by no means glamorous Fifth Avenue, picturesque Central Park or crowded, glittering Broadway, but a quiet, somewhat desolate locale somewhere in Lower Manhattan. As in other works of this genre, the ambiance in Street Scene––Evening, New York City is determined by the quality of the light, a dramatic luminosity that highlights the sharp contours of the architectural elements on the right rather than the figures, imparting a theatrical quality to the work and producing strong contrasts of light and shadow which contribute to the painting’s evocative mood. The buildings, some in darkness, other illuminated and seen against the night sky, establish a dynamic interplay of solids and voids, positive and negative space and horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines––all of which are skillfully balanced to create lively rhythms and patterns that lead our gaze around the composition.

Lewis interprets the architecture as simple planar forms that imbue the image with a high degree of geometricity and form a contrast with the sinuous shapes of the figures. His brushwork is smooth and uniform, with the exception of the quick, fluid strokes used to denote the barren tree branches on the left. In keeping with his nighttime vision, Lewis adheres to a limited palette dominated by dark blues that heighten the expressivity of the painting. Indeed, in Street Scene––Evening, New York City, Lewis’s deft manipulation of color, form and light and his unerring sense of design work together to create a intriguing work of art––one that is literal yet highly suggestive––truly indicative of the spirit of New York during the 1920s. Certainly, the painting well exemplifies Lewis’s personal brand of Realism and underscores his never-ending fascination with the spectacle of the contemporary urban environment.

CL

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