The City 1943

Lawrence Kupferman made this print, "The City," using etching, and it's really something to look at. The whole image is built from a network of lines that remind me of a cityscape teetering on the edge of abstraction. There’s this building near the top with ‘Kopper’s Coke’ written on it - the way it’s all scratched in, you can almost feel the artist digging into the plate. What I like about etching is how you can build up an image over time by repeatedly dipping the plate in acid. It’s a kind of dance between control and accident. These lines don't just describe things; they create a kind of emotional weather. The whole piece hums with this nervous energy, like the city itself. Kupferman has a clear awareness of Cubism, in the way that he breaks up the image to create multiple perspectives. It feels a bit like Max Weber’s depictions of New York, or Lyonel Feininger’s angular cityscapes, but Kupferman’s got his own thing going on. It’s as though he’s saying that the city is always moving, always changing, impossible to pin down.