Abraham Walkowitz
Abraham Walkowitz
1880 - 1965
American painter and etcher of Russian birth. In 1889 he immigrated with his family to New York, settling on the Lower East Side, which he took as the subject of his early work. While still at school he attended art classes in New York at the Cooper Union, the Educational Alliance and the National Academy of Design (1898–1900), developing a precise rendering of anatomical detail and systematic method of shading. His figurative work was first exhibited at the Educational Alliance in New York, where he taught from 1900 to 1906.
In 1906 Walkowitz moved to Paris, where he remained until 1907 and where he came under the influence of Matisse and Picasso, whom he met, and other avant-garde artists. He was particularly affected by the American dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan, whom he met in 1906 and whose style of free movement transformed his approach to the figure. He drew her obsessively in later years, seeking to capture in a few strokes the essential disposition of her pure movements and gestures. The impact of Fauvism and particularly of Matisse’s use of colour remained visible in the paintings produced by Walkowitz after his return to New York. He became part of the avant-garde group of artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in New York, 291, and in 1913 exhibited ten works at the historic ARMORY SHOW in New York. He moved closer to abstraction after a second trip to Europe in 1914, but he was not one of its most radical exponents; he found modernism particularly appropriate in capturing the dynamism of New York, in paintings such as Metropolis No. 2 (1923; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn), although he continued to employ such elements in figure compositions as late as the mid-1930s, when failing eyesight made it difficult for him to work. By the mid-1940s he stopped painting completely. [Susan T. Goodman. "Walkowitz, Abraham." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 15, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T090484.]
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