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Abraham WalkowitzModernist Drawing, Portrait of a Man1900
1900
About the Item
Abraham Walkowitz (March 28, 1878 - January 27, 1965) was an American painter grouped in with early American Modernists working in the Modernist style.
Walkowitz was born in Tyumen, Siberia to Jewish parents. He emigrated with his mother to the United States in his early childhood. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City and the Académie Julian in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens. Walkowitz and his contemporaries later gravitated around photographer Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery, originally titled the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, where the forerunners of modern art in America gathered and where many European artists were first exhibited in the United States. During the 291 years, Walkowitz worked closely with Stieglitz as well as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin (often referred to as "The Stieglitz Quartet").
Early Career and Training
Portrait of Abraham Walkowitz - 1907 - Max Weber - Brooklyn Museum
Walkowitz was drawn to art from childhood. In a 1958 oral interview with Abram Lerner, he recalled: "When I was a kid, about five years old, I used to draw with chalk, all over the floors and everything... I suppose it's in me. I remember myself as a little boy, of three or four, taking chalk and made drawings."[1] In early adulthood, he worked as a sign painter and began making sketches of immigrants in New York's Jewish ghetto where he lived with his mother. He continued to pursue his formal training, and with funds from a friend traveled to Europe in 1906 to attend the Académie Julian. Through introductions made by Max Weber, it was here that he met Isadora Duncan in Auguste Rodin's studio, the modern American dancer who had captured the attention of the avant-garde. Walkowitz went on to produce more than 5,000 drawings of Duncan.
Walkowitz' approach to art during these years stemmed from European modernist ideas of abstraction, which were slowly infiltrating the American art psyche at the turn of the century. Like so many artists of the time, Walkowitz was profoundly influenced by the 1907 memorial exhibition of Cézanne's work in Paris at the Salon d'Automne. Artist Alfred Werner recalled that Walkowitz found Cézanne's pictures to be "simple and intensely human experiences."[2] Working alongside other Stieglitz-supported American modernists, Walkowitz refined his style as an artist and produced various abstract works.
Walkowitz first exhibited at the 291 in 1911 after being introduced to Stieglitz through Hartley, and stayed with the gallery until 1917. During the 291 years, the climate for modern art in America was harsh. Until the pivotal Armory Show of 1913 had occurred which Walkowitz was involved with and exhibited in, modern artists importing radical ideas from Europe were received with hostile criticism and a lack of patronage.
Isadora Duncan Drawings
In 1927, Isadora Duncan echoed the lines of Walt Whitman in her essay I See America Dancing, writing, "When I read this poem of Whitman’s I Hear America Singing I, too, had a Vision: the Vision of America dancing a dance that would be the worthy expression of the song Walt heard when he heard America singing."[4] Duncan was the quintessence of modernism, shedding the rigid shackles of the balletic form and exploring movement through a combination of classical sculpture and her own inner sources. She described this search: "I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the body’s movement." For Duncan, dance was a distinctly personal expression of beauty through movement, and she maintained that the ability to produce such movement was inherently contained within the body.
Abraham Walkowitz was one of many artists captivated by this new form of movement. The Duncan drawings can be interpreted as representations of Walkowitz’s loftiest goals. Composing thousands of these drawings would prove to be one of the most effective outlets for his artistic agenda due to the similarities between the artistic ideals and preferred aesthetic shared by Walkowitz and Duncan. He was also able to draw from the same subject repeatedly and extract a different experience with each observation. Sculptors most readily recognized this trait in Duncan; there was a particular quality of her dance which appeared readily artistic, yet not static. Dance critic Walter Terry described it in 1963 as, "Although her dance inarguably sprang from her inner sources and resources of motor power and emotional drive, the overt aspects of her dance were clearly colored by Greek art and the sculptor’s concept of the body in arrested gesture promising further action. These influences may be seen clearly in photographs of her and in the art works she inspired."
Isadora Duncan #29, c. 1915
In each drawing, a new observation is recorded from the same subject. In the Foreword to A Demonstration of Objective, Abstract, and Non-Objective Art, Walkowitz wrote in 1913, "I do not avoid objectivity nor seek subjectivity, but try to find an equivalent for whatever is the effect of my relation to a thing, or to a part of a thing, or to an afterthought of it. I am seeking to attune my art to what I feel to be the keynote of an experience." The relaxed fluidity of his action drawings represent Duncan as subject, but ultimately reconceive the unbound movement of her dance and translates the ideas into line and shape, ending with a completely new composition.
His interest in recording the "keynote" of experience rather than producing an objective representation of a subject is central to the composition of the Duncan drawings. The fluidity of the lines function simultaneously as recognizable shapes of the human body, but also trace the pathways of the dancer’s movements. Duncan herself wrote in 1920, "...there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul."[4] Placed into a different context, this passage could function as a description of Walkowitz’s art; it is in fact taken from her essay The Philosopher’s Stone of Dancing wherein she discusses techniques to most effectively express the purest form of movement.
Walkowitz’s dedication to Duncan as a subject extended well past her untimely death in 1927. The works reveal shared convictions toward modernism and breaking links with the past. In 1958, Walkowitz told Lerner, "She (Duncan) had no laws. She did not dance according to the rules. She created. Her body was music. It was a body electric, like Walt Whitman. His body electrics. One of our greatest men, America's greatest, is Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is to me the Bible."
Significance in Art History
While never attaining the same level of fame as his contemporaries, Walkowitz' close relationship with the 291 Gallery and Alfred Stieglitz placed him at the center of the modernist movement. His early abstract cityscapes and collection of over 5,000 drawings of Isadora Duncan also remain significant art historical records.
- Creator:Abraham Walkowitz (1878 - 1965, American)
- Creation Year:1900
- Dimensions:Height: 16 in (40.64 cm)Width: 13 in (33.02 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Measurements include frame.
- Gallery Location:Surfside, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU38211635602
Abraham Walkowitz
Abraham Walkowitz is perhaps best known for his watercolor studies of Isadora Duncan and the dance. However, Walkowitz laid claim to being the first to exhibit truly modernist paintings in the United States. After 1909, he became an intimate of Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery, and while there became a participant in the debate over modern art in America. Walkowitz was an outspoken proponent of the continuous experimentation in the arts, which was his definition of modernism. As an artist, Walkowitz embodied the changing role of the modernist painter in the United States, as modernism moved from an avant-garde protest against established modes to become an accepted style and tradition.
Abraham Walkowitz was a Russian born, turn-of-the-century immigrant to the United States, who grew up in New York's Lower East Side. He first studied art at the Educational Alliance, the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. In 1906, he journeyed to Europe where he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. Upon his return to the United States in 1907, he became a fully-fledged convert to modernism, and his first exhibit, at the Haas Gallery in that year, brought him a measure of notoriety as well as the attention of Stieglitz and other pioneers of non-objective art. In subsequent years, he became one of the most exhibited painters shown at the 291 Gallery, a fact which was also reflected in the pages of Stieglitz's polemical journal of modernism, camera work. As a result of this early attention, by the time of the Armory Show of 1913, to which Walkowitz contributed several paintings, his work was widely known to both fellow modernists as well as their opponents.
Walkowitz was clearly part of the new vocabulary of American art and criticism. During the 1920s and 1930s, as the first-generation modernists lost their revolutionary cast, and as American realism gained in favor, Walkowitz continued his experiments with form and line, especially in his series of Duncan studies. Although his paintings received less critical attention than they once had, Walkowitz was clearly one of the grand old folk of American modernism. During the depression, Walkowitz was politically active on behalf of unemployed artists supporting various new-deal initiatives in the arts. In the 1940s, Walkowitz gained national attention when he explored the varieties of the modernist vision in the form of an exhibit of 100 portraits of him by 100 artists. The result was widely discussed and was featured in Life magazine in 1944.
In 1945, Walkowitz traveled to Kansas, where he painted landscapes made up largely of strip mines and barns. This was his last venture in active painting — by 1946, glaucoma, which led to his eventual blindness, began to impair his vision and limit his ability to work. Walkowitz then turned to the preparation of a series of volumes of his drawings, designed to illustrate the development of modernism in the 20th century, and in so doing, established his role as a pioneer American modernist.
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