Robert Frank

Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, circa 2000

Variant prints of this image:

Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (New York, 1989), unpaginated

Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman, Robert Frank: Moving Out (National Gallery of Art, 1994), p. 33

Robert Frank made several negatives from the same vantage point on the sidewalk outside the White Tower restaurant in New York City, clearly attracted to the strong shapes and contrast of the building exterior that form an attractive compositional framework. In the present image, Frank’s deliberate cropping include more of the lower portion of the image than is pictured in other versions.   Here, The focus is not on the architecture, but rather the modern women enjoying post-lunch coffees and cigarettes that fill the frame. A few of the women make eye contact with Frank as they start to notice they are being documented, only a few a seconds away from erupting into delighted laughter as shown in subsequent frames.

This is the largest print of this image to come to auction. Smaller prints of the image are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.