Abraham Walkowitz (1878-1965), Russian-American
Oil on canvas (34" x 30")
Art Class
Price on Request

Abraham Walkowitz (1878-1965)

Born in Siberia in 1878, Walkowitz was brought at about age five by his mother to the U.S. following his father's death. Settling into the Jewish ghetto of New York City, Walkowitz drew prodigiously as a child, and attended the Artists Institute and the National Academy of Design as a student. When his natural tendency towards experimentation was criticized, instead of giving in he opened up to the fresh influence of the budding European avant-garde.

Saving his money, in 1906 he joined the small flow of American expatriate artists following Alfred Maurer's lead to Paris. There he attended the Academie Julian and soaked up the newly emerging innovations of Cubism, Fauvism, and the movement towards abstraction. Perhaps of greatest consequence to the artist, he first met the dancer Isadora Duncan during this stayof whom he made  numerous   drawings.

Walkowitz' movement studies, however, arose out of a spirit of innovation rather than an art school environment. He was developing a felt sensibility, an intuitively expressive set of marks. While Walkowitz never developed an art that was sufficiently commanding or original to place him at the front rank of American Modernism, his place immediately behind was well earned.

After the First World War the artist continued to work prolifically, though within parameters already set before the War, until the late 1940s, when his eyesight failed. In 1963, two years before his death, the blind artist was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to some degree bearing out his own description of the career of an artist: first jeers, then sneers, and finally cheers.

Sources include, Askart, Abraham Walkowitz, Figuration 1895-1945 by Kent Smith