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Description
A collection of research materials, newspaper clippings, photographs, publications, and correspondence of American Modernist artist, Abraham Walkowitz. Abraham Walkowitz was born March 28, 1878, in Tyumen, Russia and died January 27, 1965, in New York City. In 1889, at the age 11, Walkowitz emigrated to America with his widowed mother and three sisters. By 1894 he began attending art classes at the Cooper Union and the Educational Alliance, both in New York City. It was not until 1898 that Walkowitz decided to pursue art as a profession, enrolling at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, also in New York City. Walkowitz continued his education by going to Académie Julian in Paris in 1906. In 1916, he started to gain the attention of the public with the numerous drawings that he had done on the American dancer Isadora Duncan. The number of drawings he did of Duncan led him to eventually be regarded as her portraitist. Due to his failing eyesight, his career came to a halt in the 1930s. Not wanting to give up art entirely, Walkowitz had to change his style and use more simplified shapes and designs in his images. By 1944, Walkowitz had become commissioned as one of the nation’s leading artists, with an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of ninety portraits and eleven sculptures of himself. In the summer of 1945, Walkowitz came to Kansas for a three-month stay with the Little Blue Book publisher, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. During his stay in Kansas, he completed 270 pen and ink drawings of barns and coal mines of the region, and several watercolors and oil paintings covering the same topic. In the years that followed, Walkowitz did several illustrations for Haldeman-Julius publications.
Publication Date
7-24-2019
Keywords
Fine Arts
Size of Collection
.4 linear foot
Dates of Collection
1925-2002
Manuscript Number
SpC MS 0159
Recommended Citation
Special Collections, Leonard H. Axe Library, "Walkowitz, Abraham, collection, 1925-2002" (2019). Finding Aids. 199.
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/fa/199