Central Park at Night BY ADOLF DEHN
EXPLAINING WHY he made the lithograph Central Park at Night, Dehn said,
“The towering splendor of New York’s skyline rising out of the glow of lights from the streets below,
all of which was silhouetted against the black trees at night, was the thing that excited me.”
He set himself a difficult task: “My lithographic problem was to try to get the
velvet blacks of the foreground, the intense glow oflight, and the dull glow
of the sky with the skyscrapers towering, and yet marching across the format of my paper.
This I tried to do by combining pure washes with rubbed tones, scratching and
scraping these down to light grays and pure whites, and then
drawing strong blacks over the rubbed and washed tones.”
The precise locale of the Ii thograph is the southeast corner of
Central Park, looking toward Fifth Avenue, with the Plaza,
the Savoy Plaza, and the Sherry Netherlands prominent on the sky line.
