49. Abraham Walkowitz
(1878-1965)
Two Figures Seated Before a Window

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Walkowitz: Two Figures

Two Figures Seated Before a Window

Monotype, 1904, 228 x 305 mm. A fine impression on thin japan paper in brown ink, ample margins all around, signed and dated three times in black ink. Walkowitz was born in Siberia and emigrated from there, with his mother, as a child. In New York, living in the slums, he drew constantly as a boy and young man and worked as a sign painter. He did get some formal artistic training here, and in 1906 he was able to go to Paris, one of the first Americans of the twentieth century to go and inhale the new air of modernism. Back in New York, he was consistently in the avant-garde and associated with Stieglitz, Hartley, Marin and Dove. But this monotype is dated (if one can believe it; there are always questions) 1904, two years before Paris. So it is Walkowitz’s own innate modernism here, untouched as yet by Picasso, Cezanne -- or Isadora Duncan, the subject of some thousands of his later drawings.