Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 41))

studies of John Drew as a wooden gargoyle, and Jimmie Powers as a hippopotamus, and Donald
Brian as the human corkscrew, and of certain actresses whom we don’t dare name for fear of
libel suits, have not yet been interfered with at the Photo-Secession attic, No. 291 Fifth
Avenue.

Arthur Hoeber in the “N. Y. Globe”:
Mr. Alfred Stieglitz is at it again. This time the name of his protege is A. Walkowitz,
announced as “of New York.” He is as weird as the worst of them, showing a number of
drawings and water-colors that are in the new movement with a vengeance! There are the
usual men and women who occasionally are fifteen heads high, with shoulders of enormous
breadth, with eyes placed carelessly in any part of the face that happens to be handy, with
expressions peculiar to contributors to the little gallery of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth
Avenue. The dreariness of the humanity here presented is appalling; the ugliness is monu-
mental; the proportions staggering! If there be one remote suggestion of beauty of form or
color we have failed to grasp it; if there be any reasonable excuse to so travesty the handiwork
of the Creator we are unconscious of it. Mr. Stieglitz, who is happily possessed of a fine sense
of humor, tells a story of one of the Post-Impressionists in Paris who told a neighbor he was
obliged to go to the station to meet his sister. “Well,” said the friend, “what would you
really think if you found a person who resembled your Salon portrait of the lady?” The
response is not recorded. At any rate, here are Mr. Walkowitz’s efforts, and those who are
not familiar with the new trend of painting and drawing should have a look at them. For
ourselves we confess they are entirely beyond our ken.
Samuel Swift in the “N. Y. Sun”:
Something happens now and again to remind one that art is a living thing here in New
York as well as in Paris and the productive centres of the Old World. This time it is a little
exhibition of drawings at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, that diminutive Fifth Avenue
aerie known to every radical and many progressives in art and to gentle souls as well under
the terse title of “291.” The drawings are by a man the reader is quite likely never to have
heard of up to this minute unless he has happened to drop in at the gallery within the last
ten days.
The artist is a New Yorker of Russian family and birth; his name is A. Walkowitz and
he is now in his early thirties. Until now he has not shown any of his work, but the big and
real personality that finds utterance in these drawings will hardly be allowed to hide itself
after this; what the man has to say is important, because it is in large measure his own and
because too he has learned how to embody his ideas with clarity and directness in terms of
art’s universal language.
The living quality in such of these drawings as it has been practicable to reproduce on
this page will probably have already made itself manifest to the reader. They will hardly
fail to suggest the artist’s feeling for form, for movement, for sheer weight and force. They
will also indicate his keen perception of character, of the quality in things that renders them
distinct from other things of generally similar sort.
When Walkowitz draws a figure or a group it is not necessarily a transcript of just what
he has seen, but rather a study of the reaction in his own mind from having seen or experienced
or thought. In a word this newcomer, for such in effect he is, though he has been a New
Yorker most of the time for the last twenty years, belongs to the small group of artists who
live in the full and true sense of the word and whose art is their life. Not representation, not
the imitation of nature, is the aim of men like this, but rather the portrayal of their own souls.
Walkowitz, though he would deprecate mention of so intimate a fact in his life, has given his
all to the pursuit of an ideal.
Born in Siberia of a Russian family, he was brought to America after his father’s death
and here he has lived, in straitened circumstances, but entirely content. He was for some

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