?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
MARTIN LEWIS Which Way?
Aquatint, 1932. 263x405 mm; 10 3/8x15 7/8 inches, full margins. Edition of approximately 53. Signed in pencil, lower right. Ex-collection Paul McCarron Fine Art, New York, with a label. A superb, luminous impression of this extremely scarce print.
We have found only 7 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years.
In 1929, Lewis (1881-1962, see lots 149-154) had his first New York solo exhibition. It was successful enough that he was able to give up commercial illustration work for good. During the coming years, he enjoyed so much success that as the Great Depression approached, he opted to work independently and declined participation in the Federal Art Project. Eventually, as a result of the economy, he was forced to leave New York for a short time, taking up residence in Sandy Hook, Connecticut (near friend and fellow artist Armin Landeck). When he returned to Manhattan in 1939, he taught at The Art Students League from 1944 to 1951. He died in New York in 1961, leaving behind a masterful oeuvre of prints regarded as some of the most important American graphics of the 20th century. McCarron 99.
