The man who printed the most beautiful images of two centuries
Sidney Zoltan Lucas was born on 30 May 1896 in Košice — a city where Hungarian, Slovak, German and Jewish cultures had been layered together for centuries under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was twenty when the Great War consumed his continent. He survived it.
Afterwards he went to Paris, as so many of his generation did, carrying nothing but talent and nerve. There he found his world, becoming a founding member of the American Legion's Paris Post 1, the legendary expatriate outpost of 1919. He had already grasped something essential: that a magnificent work of art, expertly reproduced on fine paper, could travel where a canvas never could.
"The most beautiful images of two centuries, gathered by one man, in one gallery."
In the late 1920s he crossed the Atlantic again. New York, 1928. He founded the Old Print Center and the Paris Etching Society in Midtown Manhattan, and over four decades built a print-publishing operation of singular distinction. He and his wife Phyllis lived at 252 East 52nd Street, a few blocks from his gallery at 981 Second Avenue.
He published after John Gould's extraordinary ornithological birds; after Utrillo's rain-grey Paris and the iconic Lapin-Agile; after Séguy's Art Déco botanicals; after Boris O'Klein's sardonic comedy dogs of Paris; after Prévost's bouquets, Currier & Ives' America, and Bartolozzi's months of the year. In January 1965, Salvador Dalí — the most famous living artist on Earth — appointed Lucas his exclusive North American publisher of hand-signed limited editions. Thirty-one Dalí editions followed; the Surrealist came to the gallery on 52nd Street, and they became friends.
Sidney Lucas died on 2 July 1966, aged seventy. He did not know what his archive would become. Phyllis continued the gallery until her own passing in 1995, after which the great archive — the prints of his forty years — passed into secure storage in London, where it remained, authenticated and untouched, for a generation. It is offered now for the first time in forty years.