Paris: Pommes Frites - Lunch Hour

 

Max Pollak

  1886 - 1970 (biography)

c. 1935  

color aquatint with drypoint 

10 15/16 x 8 3/8" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

around 35 impressions 

pencil titled, lower left; pencil editioned 18/150 and annotated "printed a. 35" (printed around 35); titled again along lower left sheet edge, including "Lunch Hour" 

 

thin, antique-white wove 

published 

artist 

23672 

SOLD

The hustle and bustle of city life is illustrated in this Parisian lunchtime scene, as workers and shoppers take a break from their errands to enjoy a bite to eat in the arcade of an old stone building. A large sign overhead indicates a print shop within; below it, a man rests against the facade as steam from a portable pommes frites stove plumes up and out through the opened entrance. Meanwhile, an orange cat sits in a window in the upper left, observing the day.

Max Pollak returned to France several times to capture the cities and villages he had first come across as an art student traveling throughout Europe in 1912. By the time he created this image he had been living in the United States for a handful of years, having emigrated from Vienna to New York in 1927. Paris would remain a source of inspiration to him for years to come.