Building a Babylon, Tudor City, N.Y.C.

“Many of Lewis’s most accomplished prints were inspired by the artist’s observation of New York City…Skyscrapers stepped in adherence to contemporaneous zoning laws are monumentalized in Lewis’s Building a Babylon, Tudor City, N.Y.C. (lot 13)… Lewis drew both from the wide variety of architectural shapes and from the mundane but picturesque details of daily life in the metropolis…Other subjects, as in Relics [Speakeasy Corner] (lot 14), include everyday sights as important compositional elements – a car on a deserted street, a clothesline outside tenement windows. The incorporation of specific city buildings, documenting what has become period detail, adds another layer of interest to many of Lewis’s prints for the contemporary viewer.  Like the Thirty-fourth Street Armory and the subway kiosks, many structures have been demolished and their surrounding neighborhoods completely changed.  Lewis’s depictions of the modern city of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s have become documents of New York City’s architectural and social history.” (McCarron, The Prints of Martin Lewis, A Catalogue Raisonné, 21-22)