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

years a member of the art class at the Educational Alliance, having several talented young
men as his fellows—Jo Davidson, the sculptor, now in Paris; Samuel Halpert and Joseph
Weiss, already making their way here as painters, and others.
Next came a period at the Art Students’ League, and after that Walkowitz was in some
way enabled to go to Europe for eighteen months, where he traveled with miraculous economy,
saw pictures and sculpture and art works of an older civilization and met people, but chiefly
lived his own life of wandering observation and leisurely thought. At the end of his term of
foreign travel the young student returned and eventually drifted into an ironic way of making
enough to keep body and soul together by the painting of doctors’ and other signs for a down-
town firm producing such things. Critics of the lettering work on these signs from Mr. Walk-
owitz’s hand declare that they are excellent. No doubt they are; but their chief merit, it
seems, is the furnishing of a bare living to the painter without compelling him to exercise his
imagination in doing the work.
For Walkowitz is careful not to put pressure upon his creative faculties. And he is wholly
uncommercial; this is the first time he has shown his work, which has been done solely for his
own pleasure. At intervals, after he has accumulated a modest sum by his lettering work, he
takes two or three months to draw and paint and see things — men digging subway trenches,
bathers on the Coney Island beach, groups of people in the streets, dancers upon the stage, a
thousand sights that any one may see but of which few isolate for themselves the general note,
the universal quality.
What is the relation of all this turmoil to a man’s inner life? As tiny atoms in a great
tide that is sweeping on do we realize our individual meaning, our distinctive function? It is
the business of an artist to be a thinker and a seer. When he has no clear vision he may well
hold his peace and this has been the course of the artist under discussion at various stages in
his career. There have been months during which Walkowitz has not put pencil to paper. At
this moment indeed he is doing nothing, and until he has something new to say his friends
believe he will maintain his present inactivity. It is no more necessary for an artist in any
medium who has mastered the secret of expression to be continually producing than it was
for Richard Wagner to go on composing music for every week of his life. Fallow periods give
time for quiet development, for ripening, and are not to be counted as unproductive times
after all.
Like other artists Walkowitz has built his edifice upon the art of the past as a foundation.
But he has been himself the principal contributor to his own art. Paul Cezanne has been an
influence, as in the work of many another seeker for truthful and convincing expression, and
it might not be difficult to trace the stimulus of Manet and of Rodin in certain elements here.
But chiefly the substance of these utterances is that of the man who has set them down in
final form.
At the exhibition in Mr. Stieglitz’s gallery Walkowitz may be studied in contrasted phases.
There are drawings so delicate and fine in their lines that it would have been hopeless to try
to reproduce them in a newspaper illustration. There are studies of dancing nudes, alive with
rhythmic beauty and the very essence of joyous grace. There are charcoal drawings in which
there is a truly sculptural feeling for the play of light and shade upon form, drawings in which
the gamut of a crayon’s tints from black to gray has been sounded with something better than
discretion, because the artist’s selections of color and value have a hint somehow of the in-
evitable; they have been done by instinct. Water-colors are here too, in which the medium is
broadly and admirably used as a vehicle of eloquent expression.
It is the essence of things and persons that Mr. Walkowitz has sought to separate from
what is accidental and trivial. Here in the exhibition is a portrait head of a large eyed man with
an aspect of arresting, in a subdued and subtle way, that it compels notice even in a group
of drawings, some of which glorify the heroic in physical movement and dynamic force. The
head of the man is drawn with firm but almost reluctant detail. It is modeled with the utmost
care and understanding, as though the author were absolutely at one with his theme. It
reveals character, not in any obvious way, but in touches that have psychology behind them.

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