Abraham Walkowitz
Isadora Duncan
1910

Name: Isadora Duncan
Brand: Abraham Walkowitz
Price: 1500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Isadora Duncan Graphite with grey wash on paper mounted to cardstock Signed and dated in pencil lower right (see photo) Provenance: Charlotte Bergman, friend of the artist and amassed a major collection of Walkowitz works. Biography available. Condition: Mounted to card stock by the artist Sheet size: 9 3/8 x 7 inches Artist bio in file (W) By Bill Lasarow Abraham Walkowitz is one of those shadowy yet familiar figures of American Modernism. He was among the small vanguard of artists who first transplanted the sprig of European Modernism here during the first decade of the 20th Century. Born in Siberia in 1878, he was brought by his mother to the U.S. around the age of five 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 Julien 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 stay. He ultimately made more drawings of her “than I have hairs on my head,” by his own account, recalling her figure as his archetype for the next four decades, even well after her death. These drawings, at times highlighted with a wash of color that defines Duncan’s dress, resemble the movement studies now familiar to any art student. Line is used to react to a model in motion--feeling out the look of the figure replaces the careful observation that goes into extended posing. 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. The importance of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Braque on Walkowitz’ approach is clear enough. The notion that art is a non-verbal language that holds a kinship with music, dance and other similarly non-verbal means of expression may not resonate with possibility anymore. But a century ago it propelled Wassily Kandinsky into the new realms of non-referential abstraction. Walkowitz was among this new generation of true believers in a new visual language that would emerge from the inner life of the artist. Indeed, he did not hesitate to try his hand at the pure abstraction pioneered by Kandinsky. 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. It is difficult to appreciate the level of inner certainty Walkowitz and other members of the nascent avant-garde clearly possessed--from the time of his first exhibition in 1908 he had to learn to accept ridicule. As a member of Alfred Steiglitz’ inner circle and a regular exhibitor at his renowned 291 Gallery until it closed in 1917, and as an active participant in the keystone Armory Show of 1913, Walkowitz quite knowingly accepted that oftentimes large numbers of visitors would attend his shows and those of his close colleagues not to admire but to laugh at what they saw. 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. Charlotte Bergman (1903-2002) Charlotte Bergman was born in Antwerp in 1903. She was the daughter of a Polish-born diamond merchant. Charlotte Bergman married Louis Bergman, an English architect with whom she shared a great love of travel and art. They resided in London for many years and traveled to Israel and the Middle East for the first time in the 1920s. They came into contact with many artists, including Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and many others. They were very close to Raoul Dufy, a friend who often joined the couple on their travels. The Bergmans collected examples of Dufy's art, including a portrait he painted of Charlotte. Other artists collected by the couple included Braque and Chagall, as well as Antal Biró. Charlotte and Louis Bergman found themselves in the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War. They never returned to live in England. Charlotte lost many members of her European family during the Holocaust. In New York City, the Bergmans were involved with the leading events and personalities of the day. Their apartment became a salon for music, art and politics and they became fervent supporters of the Zionist movement and the nascent State of Israel. After Louis Bergman died in 1955, Charlotte continued to travel and collect new works of art. She immigrated to Israel following the Six-Day War. Sharing Teddy Kollek's early vision for a national museum in Jerusalem, she was involved in the establishment of the Israel Museum. She also became an active, though often anonymous, supporter of other philanthropic concerns in the country. In the 1970s, Charlotte Bergman built her permanent home on the Museum grounds, with the encouragement of Teddy Kollek. Bergman located her collections of art and ethnography there. Just as she did in New York, in Jerusalem, Charlotte hosted may events and welcomed visitors from Israel and abroad to her home. On July 17, 2002 - one month before her 99th birthday - Charlotte Bergman died in her bedroom, today referred to as the Henry Moore room. The house and its paintings, sculptures, ceramics and works on paper were bequeathed to the Israel Museum. Charlotte Bergman asked that the house be used as a venue for special events, as it was in her lifetime, and that it be viewed as the home of an art lover at the end of the 20th century, in the spirit of the Israel Museum's period rooms. The legacy of Charlotte Bergman lives on in the house she built on the Israel Museum's grounds. Courtesy Wikipedia

Creator:

Abraham Walkowitz (1878 - 1965, American)

Creation Year:

1910

Dimensions:

Height: 9.375 in (23.82 cm)Width: 7 in (17.78 cm)

Medium:

Graphite

Movement & Style:

American Modern

Period:

1910-1919

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Fairlawn, OH

Reference Number:

Seller: FA47891stDibs: LU1407869372

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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.