Max Pollak was born in Prague in 1886. He grew up in Vienna, where he studied printmaking under William Unger and Ferdinand Schmutzer. He won the Prix de Rome for his etchings in 1910. In WWI Pollak was an official war artist for the Austrian army. After spending three years in Paris, in 1927 Max Pollak emigrated to the United States, settling in San Francisco, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was a member of the California Society of Etchers (winning their award in 1942, 1944, and 1945) and of the Chicago Society of Etchers (winning their award in 1942). In his American years Pollak etched scenes in Mexico and Central America, as well as California. Brilliant and accomplished as these etchings are, it is generally thought that his work in Vienna and Paris is his finest, most particularly the sensuous portraits he etched of dancers such as Maria Ley, Kitty Starling, Ronny Johansson, and Isa Marsen. These are triumphant examples of movement captured in a still image, etched i...
John Piper's topographical paintings and prints offer an unparalleled record of mid twentieth-century Britain. While at one point in the 1930s Piper was poised to be one of the leaders of English abstraction, his sudden reversal to representational art in 1938 came just in time for him to re-evaluate both the natural and the built landscape at a time when both were under threat. The three lithographs in this post were made for an article by John Piper in The Cornhill in November 1944, entitled Topographical Letter from Devizes, and form a loving record of the market town of Devizes in Wiltshire, "this most ordinary of English towns". The Cornhill magazine was edited by Peter Quennell; this issue also includes contributions by John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Alan Moorhead, Elizabeth Bowen and others. John Piper, Devizes: In Long Street (Levinson 57A) Lithograph, 1944 Piper writes of Devizes with great fondness, celebrating "its good minor architecture, magnificent...
What on earth kind of print can be on the other side of this? Oakey's Waterproof Flint Paper, made expressly for wet-rubbing-down by Wellington Mills, London? The answer is a stencilled intepretation of an untitled painting by Joan Mir�. It is printed on this extraordinary sandpaper support because that is what Mir� himself had used for the original. The artist responsible for the stencil was John Piper. Piper recalls this episode in "Working with Printers", written in 1987 for Orde Levinson's catalogue raisonn�, "Quality and Experiment": The Prints of John Piper. Remembering Curwen's support for the avant-garde journal Axis: A Quarterly Review of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, which was edited by Piper's wife-to-be Myfanwy Evans and published by A. Zwemmer, Piper writes, "He even encouraged me to reproduce a Mir� which had been painted on glass paper, on real glass paper , and bound it into Signature." It appeared in Signature 7 in 1...