printmaker, art teacher and commercial artist, ran away from his home in Castlemaine, Vic. at the age of fifteen (ie in 1896 or 1897) and did odd jobs throughout Australia and New Zealand for four years. He had been impressed by the 'distinctly Australian approach’ of Streeton’s paintings in the 'Sydney Sunshine’ exhibition at Melbourne in 1896 and took a few art classes at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School; he also had two drawings published in the Bulletin (see McCarron). Aged 19-20, he left for the USA, working his way as a merchant seaman. After stopping in San Francisco and Chicago, he settled in New York where he found work as a commercial artist and illustrator. While working as a commercial artist he also visited London.
Apparently entirely self-taught as a printmaker (although he may have been introduced to the medium at Ashton’s), he seriously began making fine art prints c.1912, producing about148 etchings and drypoints in his lifetime, normally in editions of 100 or less. In 1915 he taught his friend Edward Hopper to etch; both used similar urban images in their work. In the 1920s, disillusioned with commercial art, he lived in Japan for 2 years and renewed his interest in printmaking through study of the Ukiyo-e masters especially Ando Hiroshige. In 1925 he presented two early etchings to Castlemaine Museum and Art Gallery: The Holocaust 1918 (on the carnage of WWI) and On the Rooftops, New York 1918. Sold through his dealer, the Kennedy Gallery in New York, the most sought-after of his meticulously detailed naturalistic copper-plate etchings (drypoints, some with sandpaper ground) are those that depict life in New York in the 1920s and early ’30s, e.g. Glow of the City 1929, drypoint (Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY: ill. Imprint 5), Shadow Dance 1930, drypoint and sandpaper ground, and Little Penthouse 1931, drypoint (ill. McCrohon).
Lewis’s prints sold moderately well in his lifetime and he was able to move out of commercial art. After the Wall Street Crash, he and his family retreated to a farm in Connecticut. This resulted in prints of rural snow scenes and misty highways, which were initially denigrated in comparison to his urban prints but are now also sought after. He disliked rural life and returned to New York in the late 1930s, but the print market was still in the doldrums. Shadow Magic 1939 is one of his most abstract works, acc. to McKay. He made a series of portraits for the movie Mourning Becomes Electra for which he received $10,000, but he didn’t like Hollywood either. He returned to New York, where realist art had become increasingly unfashionable.
Lewis became a teacher of graphics at the Art Students’ League on 57th Street and taught there until a few years before his death, on 22 February 1962, aged 82. In the US there has been a massive resurgence of interest in his work in recent years, with prices skyrocketing (his best prints have reached $A75,000) since the publication of art historian McCarron’s The Prints of Martin Lewis . His daughter-in-law, Patricia Lewis, lives in Quebec.
