‘The whole town was mad about Cézanne. It was Cézanneitis, Picassoitis and Matisseitis. Those are the three poisonous things for the artist,’ proclaims Abraham Walkowitz during an oral history interview conducted for the Archives of American Art in the winter of 1958.
The Tyumen, Russia-born, Walkowitz, who during the interview is affectionately called ‘Walky’ by Abram Lerner, the first director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is remembers ofthe artistic atmosphere he found in Paris in 1906, when he arrived from New York to continue his studies at the Académie Julian.
‘The American artists began to ape Cézanne, and that was a disease, you know,’ he continues. ‘I called it Matisseitis, Picassoitis, and Cézanneitis. It's a dangerous thing. I never did that.’
It was during this first of three stints in Paris, at sculptor Auguste Rodin’s studio, that Walkowitz first saw and met the American-born dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan, a leading innovator of modern dance. ‘She had no laws. She didn't dance according to the rules. She created,’ he reminisces about their mutual artistic ambition. Dora writes in her autobiography ‘My Life’ (1927), ‘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.’
Walkowitz’s precocious alertness to the perils of prevailing influences is telling of his life-long resolve to forge his own path through a framework of his own design. In re-examining his prolific output today, of which over 5000 works alone are movement and rhythm studies of Duncan, it is plain to see that the life he dedicated to art fostered one of the most singular oeuvres and striking contributions to the early development of American modernism.
His work centres around the dogged pursuit of capturing a deeply personal essence felt in response to the unprecedented social and physical changes taking place across America, and more specifically in his adoptive home of New York. Despite a very limited audience for such a radical approach to image making, Walkowitzwas undeterred. ‘I was fearless. There were no “Ifs” with me. I knew I was right,’ he recalls of an exhibition in 1908 that was critically derided. He soon came under the wing of the highly influential Alfred Stieglitz and his bastion for American modernists, his gallery known as 291, which offered a platform for his work. But artistic recognition remained elusive. Asked by Lerner, ‘do you feel that you've made a place for yourself in American art, that people show you the proper respect?’ Walkowitz replies dejectedly: ‘A few people here and there. Very rare.’
This may have something to do with the sheer volume of the obsessive studies of Duncan which have become something of an albatross around the neck of his larger artistic contribution, stealing focus from the achievements of his fervent experimentation during his creative peak between the late-1900s and the early-1930s. During this period, Walkowitz flittered between a wide range of mediums, including pen, ink, charcoal,watercolour and oil paint, stubbornly veering from figuration to abstraction and back again as it best served his artistic vision. ‘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,’ he wrote in the introduction to ‘100 Paintings and Drawings from the Objective to Abstract’ (1925).
Beyond the studies of Duncan, Walkowitz’s oeuvre can be separated into two distinct yet inextricably linked visual categories; monochrome works that are mostly drawings, and colour works that are mostly paintings. They run parallel to each other, sharing subjects and artistic intent, but they differ in how Walkowitz attempts to visually describe the keynote of an experience. In the former, it is his ability to exploit the subtleties of line manipulation. This takes on an increased sense of pictorial drama as he moves towards abstraction, where spontaneity and control electrically rub together like tectonic plates.
In the figurative pair of drawings ‘Skyscrapers from Improvisations of New York’ (1910), in the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walkowitz sculpts the looming physicality of the buildings with phenomenalvisceral acuity with just the slightest change of pressure in his hand. At the bottom in each, a mass of dense marks alludes to the swarms of people bustling. In each building a vertical line made up of short stabs runs up the centre that increases greatly towards the top, implying windows. But it also humorously alludes to the seemingly never-ending race to build taller and taller buildings. In a fascinating exchange with Lerner, Walkowitz anthropomorphises the city’s architectural boom he saw during the first decades of the 20th century, saying: ‘One building is jealous of the other: “I want to be taller,” “I want to be taller.” They all want to reach the sky.’ Lerner interjects, enthusiastically: ‘It's almost as if you could foresee thirty or forty years ago . . . how New York City would, yes, it seems that Nature is imitating Walkowitz.’ ‘Of course, replies Walkowitz assuredly, as if a matter of fact.
In the ink drawing ‘Improvisations of New York’ (1914), in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, New York, he pushes a similar composition into the mouth of abstraction. He reduces the skyline to a mesh of fluid and dynamic mark making that symphonically captures the frenetic energy he sees whirring around him. Arcing and looping lines swirl around the almost indecipherable skyscrapers, leaving each one resembling a caricature of the Tower of Babel. While, in a work like the Conté crayon and graphite drawing ‘Abstract Cityscape’ (1913), in the collection of The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, and completed a year earlier, Walkowitz goes all the way, intrepidly distilling the city skyline to its fundamental linear forms. In various weights of line, triangles and rectangles interlock, bifurcated by sweeping arcs and modulated with diagonal shading to give a whisper of three-dimensionality. The recognisable energy and intensity of the more figurative works is undeniably present, but what we see is in and of itself something entirely new to us. ‘New forms are born in equivalents of line or colour improvisations,’ he writes in his introduction for ‘100 Paintings and Drawings from the Objective to Abstract’. ‘The artist creates a new form of life.’
In the latter, it is colour, which Walkowitz keenly observes in the introduction is an integral part of his practice. But it has remained undervalued in critical and scholarly appreciation of his work. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to witness the imagination in Walkowitz’s strategic employment and his ability to activate his images with it. It is deceptively simple in appearance but demonstrates a deep understanding of historical and contemporary colour and spatial dynamics. This is particularly evident in his more figurative watercolours, where it can be persuasively argued that the nuances of the medium most effectively convey the keynote of an experience he was seeking to visualise.
Walkowitz largely favours muted colours. In ‘Cityscape’ (c. 1915), his use of pale ochres, cold, dark blues and muddied greys to fill in the cubist-like scaffolding he constructs the thrusting skyline with, elegiacally charts the wide range of colours seen as the sunlight strikes them at different times of day.
Often, Walkowitz accentuates large areas of muted colours with tantalising glimpses of vivid colours, like the shocks of yellow and orange that creep through the mass of lines denoting a crowd seen at the very bottom of the watercolour ‘New York’ (1908). This plays off the tall passages of heavily diluted, lightly coloured watercolour that inform the skyscrapers, creating a wonderful sense of surface tension; like seeing fireworks erupt in the sky before the sun has set. Likewise, in the beguiling drawing ‘Coney Island Cityscape’ (1914), in contrast to the majority of the composition which is finished with only faint areas of colour, a band seen across the centre that is characterised by heavily applied mustard yellow, scarlet, orange, and flashes of jade greencrayon slyly pulls the image away from its figurative roots.
But even these examples pale in comparison to Walkowitz’s inspired handling of watercolour seen in ‘Still Life’ (1906). Here, when looking at how he models the form of two ripe tomatoes in loose red and orange brushwork, capitalising on the visual intricacies of saturation unique to the medium, it gives the impression of an interior luminosity that is almost religious in its reading. The plum purple he partly fills in the background with, a foil that sharply pronounces it even more.
At Walkowitz’s most masterful, is one of the jewels of his oeuvre, the small-scale, undated ‘Bathers’ in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. It depicts a group of figures crowded onto a parcel of unidentifiable land, perching and stretching out, eerily unaware of one another and not interacting. Above them are the briefest sweeps of an overcast grey punctuated with areas of blue bleeding through. In the foreground, flickers of maroon and green emerge from soft, swift washes of muddied watercolour that effortlessly announce the stirring waters.
Yet, our eye is drawn to the way Walkowitz delicately manipulates the saturation of the watercolour in choosing where and how he denotes the flesh of the bodies in soft, velvet brown. Here, the luminosity seen in the tomatoes, is condensed, multiplied and amplified in its delivery across most of the composition rather than in a confined area. Each figure exudes an extraordinary presence, as if they are the human embodiment of the sublime. As our eye darts from one to the next, and then allows them all to briefly merge in soft focus, the image momentarily evokes what the next generation of gestural abstract painters were searching to describe visually.
‘Here, then, is an artist who not only should appeal to the more profound art-lover but should interest all other artists who are seriously striving toward significant expression,’ writes critic Willard Huntington Wright in the astute conclusion-cum-rallying cry in his essay for ‘100 Paintings and Drawings from the Objective to Abstract’. A rallying cry that is even more pertinent today than it was when it was written. He continues, ‘In a day of wide-spread and slavish imitation both in and out of the schools, Walkowitz stands conspicuously forth as an artist who has followed his own vision and has sought for the meaning of beauty, not in the externalities of life, but in the deeper relationships of line and form,’ and, it must be retroactively revised, in colour.
