New York: Manhattan Bridge

Max Pollak

Max Pollak was living in New York in the late 1920s, having moved there from Austria in 1927. After years of traveling throughout Europe as a tourist and as an Austrian Army artist in World War I, Pollak found great inspiration in the modern architecture and urban energy saturating the cosmopolitan city.

Pollak was commissioned by author Theodore Dreiser to do a series of eight etchings of New York which were reproduced in Dreiser's book "My City", published in 1929. Dreiser discovered Pollak’s work at an exhibition at 57th Street Gallery. This is one of the etchings that was not used in the book.

All the New York images were then published by Rudolf Lesch Fine Arts, New York. Though editioned as 150 Pollak did not finish the whole edition, the stock market crashed the next year, when Dreiser's book was published, and the economic practicality of printing a full edition disappeared.

Pollak captures the industrial shores of the East River’s Manhattan side, dominated by the relatively new span connecting the island city to Brooklyn. Completed in 1909, the Manhattan Bridge was necessitated by the boom in residential and business growth of Brooklyn, when, at the time, only the Brooklyn Bridge connected the two destinations. The sense of bustling industry and dazzling modernity come together in this dramatic cityscape.