San Francisco California Street

Max Pollak

Max Pollak was born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Vienna, Austria. A printmaker with a long and productive career, his intaglio subjects included genre, land and cityscapes, and portraits from throughout Europe, the Holy Land, the United States, and Latin America.

The Pollaks traveled across the United States before settling in Sausalito, California in 1938. As they had traveled Max captured the cities with his impressionistic color intaglios; New York, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Washington DC, New Orleans, etc. Max Pollak did this color aquatint and drypoint around 1940 and chose as his subject a composition of a street from his adopted home, San Francisco, California, viewed from the bottom of the hill on California Street.

The viewer's eye is directed past the pagoda of the Sing Fat Company building at Grant Avenue to the top of the hill. The cable car line runs down the middle, with traffic lanes, parking, and sidewalks stretching out to sides.

Pollak squeezes the composition by adding the edges of buildings at the right and left, the effect of which heightens the sense of the vertical street, while the cars in the foreground provide a horizontal base as the cars and red cable car begin their climb.

The artist anticipated a large edition of 150 however, fewer than 50 were ever printed.