Biography

Martin Lewis was an Australian-born American painter and printmaker best known for his representations of urban and pastoral landscapes. The artist’s work possessed an eerie quality, underscored by a subtle noir effect used to depict urban crime, as seen in his Bedford Street Gang (1935). Born on June 7, 1881 in Castlemaine, Australia, he studied at the Art Society’s School in Sydney under Julian Rossi Ashton and later worked in newspaper illustration. In 1900, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a decorative stage painter for William McKinley’s presidential campaign. In 1920, he traveled to Japan to study traditional printmaking, returning to the United States two years later. Between 1925 and 1935, the artist produced some of his best known etchings. Lewis died in 1962 in New York, NY. Today, his works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.