Pop's Tavern

Deriving its title from the prominent restaurant sign hanging from the building in the right foreground, Armin Landeck's Pop's Tavern provides an oblique glimpse of a nearly deserted narrow side-street in New York City at night. Two figures loiter outside the illuminated window of a laundry shop on the left; further up the street, a lone pedestrian moves along the sidewalk beneath a lit theater sign near an alley. Two cars are parked along the curb, facing a wider, more brightly lit street just glimpsed in the distance. Along with the tavern sign, the grill of a fire escape, a typical urban detail, breaks into the vista on the right. The aspiring commercialism of the homey tavern sign contrasts with the hushed atmosphere of this seemingly overlooked byway, an oasis in the typical urban tumult of the surrounding city. Landeck used aquatint to create varying dark tones that evoke the range of shadows cloaking this Greenwich Village scene, punctuated by glowing lights.

   New York City views inspired many of the prints Armin Landeck made during a productive decade beginning in the early 1930s. During that time, the artist owned a family home in Connecticut but rented workspace in the city to maintain a toehold in its stimulating art world. This quiet night cityscape shows the view from Landeck's studio on Christopher Street, in the West Greenwich Village neighborhood. Its focus on an unpretentious street of small businesses epitomized by Pop's Tavern contrasts with other prints in which Landeck, like many of his contemporaries, presents Manhattan in vast urban panoramas of soaring skyscrapers. The hushed intimacy of Pop's Tavern, as well as its high window vantage point, recall Edward Hopper's earlier Night Shadows (TF 1995.7).

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