Which Way?

A car stops at a snow-covered rural intersection cloaked in darkness in Martin Lewis's suggestive Which Way? The automobile's bright headlights illuminate the form and texture of snow clinging to a lone telephone pole and the adjacent terrain of the little-traveled road bounded by a snow-laden stone wall and a few trees, beyond which a distant, seemingly deserted farm seems inaccessible. The driver must turn, but the darkened landscape makes his choice of left or right equally arbitrary. Lewis manipulated his aquatint medium to create startling whites in dramatic contrast to the rich, inky black tones of the background countryside and the moonless night sky, punctuated by stars. This remarkably pristine impression is printed on cool, pale blue paper that subtly enhances the wintry crispness of the subject.

During the Great Depression, when the market for fine prints collapsed, Lewis and his wife left New York City to find more affordable housing in rural Connecticut. Which Way? is one of seventeen prints the artist made based on his numerous sketches of New England scenes. The print documents an era when such locales were being transformed by the automobile, the spread of roads, and the installation of telephone poles and lines along them. In Lewis's print, the driver's dilemma, underscored by the title, seems a metaphor for the insecurity and confusion of a nation in the throes of economic turmoil and on the eve of a presidential election.

On Process: The American Print, Technique Examined, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 2, 2001.

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, May 2003.

America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper, Terra Foundation for American Art and the Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, UK (organizers.) Venue: Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, UK, March 23, 2018–July 22, 2018 [exh. cat.]

McCarron, Paul. Martin Lewis: The Graphic Work. (exh. cat., Kennedy Galleries). New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1973. No. 106.

McCarron, Paul. The Prints of Martin Lewis: A Catalogue Raisonné. Bronxville, New York: M. Hausberg, 1995. No. 99, p. 179.

Sikkema, Scott. Which Way? Martin Lewis. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, May 2003. Ill. (color). [specific reference to Terra print]

Bourguignon, Katherine M., Lauren Kroiz, and Leo G. Mazow. Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper. Oxford, United Kingdom: Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology–University of Oxford, 2018. Text p. 49, cat. no.47 (checklist); ill. pp. 48, 144 (color).