Second Avenue c. 1935

Edwin Kaufman made this print of Second Avenue, with its web of etched lines, sometime before 1939. I’m curious about what it was like for Kaufman to make this piece, the decisions he must have made about where to add detail and where to leave the paper bare. I feel for him, trying to capture the energy of the street scene and the cavernous, overbearing presence of the elevated train line. It looks like he’s wrestling with the medium, trying to find the balance between light and dark, between the architecture and the teeming crowds. The little vignettes he conjures up, the figures reading and trading by the fruit stands, are so intimate. And the textures! The brickwork, the awnings, the gritty pavement—it’s all there in the cross-hatching. This print reminds me of the work of the Ashcan School painters who also wanted to portray the real life of the city, not the pretty, mannered version. Artists are always responding to each other across time, trying to capture something fleeting.