Bistro

This is a woodcut, cut into a block barely bigger than a postcard, about 17 centimetres across. Pencho Georgiev made it in 1931, in the middle of the years a state scholarship kept him in Paris, a young man from provincial Bulgaria learning the printmaker's craft. A bistro was the plainest place a person could eat in the city, and a woodcut is the plainest way to print an image: no fine shading, just black and white cut out of the wood with a knife. He kept turning to that everyday side of Paris, its cheap eating-houses and back streets, rather than its monuments and famous views. The print is held today in the National Gallery in Sofia, among his graphic work from those years.