New York: Eastside I: Allen Street by Max Pollak

New York: Eastside I: Allen Street by Max Pollak

New York: Eastside I: Allen Street

Max Pollak

Please call us at 707-546-7352 or email artannex@aol.com to purchase this item.
Title

New York: Eastside I: Allen Street

 
Artist

Max Pollak

  1886 - 1970 (biography)
Year
1928  
Technique
color etching & aquatint 
Image Size
14 x 5 3/4" platemark 
Signature
pencil, lower right 
Edition Size
37 of 150  
Annotations
titled, lower left; bears the red stamp F.P.C. for Friedl Pollak Collection; stamped verso "Made in Austria"; titled in pencil at sheet edge, lower left 
Reference
reproduced as plate seven in Theodore Dreiser's "My City", 1920 
Paper
textured ivory wove 
State
published 
Publisher
 
Inventory ID
22488 
Price
$1,000.00 
Description

Max Pollak was commissioned by author Theodore Dreiser to do a series of eight color etchings of New York which were then reproduced in his book "My City", published in 1929 by Horace Liveright. This image was as plate seven in the book and was also published by Rudolf Lesch Fine Arts, New York. Pollak printed a number of the works while in his Austria, where he was brought up.

Though the edition for the New York images was anticipated as 150 Pollak did not finish the whole edition, the stock market crashed the next year, 1929, when Dreiser's book was published, and the economic practicality of printing a full edition disappeared.

Allen Street in Lower Manhattan in New York City runs through Chinatown and the Lower East Side. During the early part of the 20th century, Allen Street was a center for brass and copper fabrication shops, often located in the basements of the buildings.

In Pollak's "New York: Eastside I" a man enters a basement shop; banners for a dressmaker and other small businesses hang under the fire escapes, a barber's pole leans toward the street, laundry flutters from the clotheslines strung from the windows as a pedestrian ambles by.

 

Please call us at 707-546-7352 or email artannex@aol.com to purchase this item.