Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1916 (Heft 48))

recent drawings and watercolors now on exhibition here at once fascinate and tantalize—if
they don’t bewilder and exasperate—the average normal picture gazer, is one of the progressive
artists who distinctively belong in just this sort of a laboratory.
We are now in a realm of pure aesthetics. Abstract compositions in black-and-white
line and in color lure the fancy, and gradually satisfy the sense, until we are almost willing to
agree that titles and catalogues (which there are none) would be superfluous. The dizzy con-
gestion of tall buildings in lower Manhattan is noted with sufficient objectivity to be quite
obvious, without a specific label that would belie its generalization. The harmonious impression
of a provincial town or village is sufficient unto itself, and whether the place happens to be in
Normandy or in New Jersey has no relevancy to the pictorial notation. When it comes to
human figures, the partial or complete disembodiment at first seems baffling—but that is only a
matter of habit or degree. There is an exquisite nebulous abstraction of a nude, in color, or
rather in aerial tints of rose and blue, which positively holds in solution all the elements of
Venus’ beauty, without the slightest hint of a line.
“If an experience brings to me a harmonious sensation,” says Mr. Walkowitz, “I then
try to find the concrete elements that are likely to record the sensation in visual forms, in the
medium of lines, of color shapes, of space division. When the line and color are sensitized
they seem to me alive with the rhythm which I felt in the thing that stimulated my imagination
and my expression. If my art is true to its purpose then it should convey to me in graphic
terms the feeling which I received in imaginative terms. That is as far as the form of my
expression is involved. As to its content, it should satisfy my need of creating a record of an
experience.”
That is clear and frank enough, surely. And the working out of the theory, in Mr.
Walkowitz’ instance, produces results so closely akin to those arrived at by Messrs. Picasso,
Picabia, Haweis, Weber, Zorach, Arthur Davies, John Marin and Marsden Hartley (to name
only a few artists whose work has become fairly familiar in current exhibitions), as to offer
encouraging signs of co-ordination or crystallization of the “modern” ideas in art. Maybe some
masterly synthetic genius will come along and give them a common denominator.
Elizabeth Luther Carey in the “N. Y. Times”:
At the Photo-Secession Galleries Mr. Walkowitz is showing his latest work, which is
abstract and subjective, extremely skillful, often disconcerting, sometimes beautiful. His way
of putting it is that a man’s feelings may be recorded graphically with as much success as at-
tends the recording of sound. If your instrument is in tune and you are a master of music
you can play. Your performance depends upon what you have within yourself to offer. He
draws and paints in this exhibition not so much objects as his feelings toward objects, and they
are extremely tactile feelings as he presents them. If he were using only the old formula of
representation we might find him shocking to a civilized taste. As it is, he is either shielded or
betrayed by a formula of expression not generally understood. Much of his work has to the
commonplace observer the look of fungous growth and is accordingly unpleasant. A very
little of it, notably the things in color, is tonic and spirited. Where his central form is that of
mountains, a city, steps, anything remote from the human figure, the result is agreeable, although
seldom really stimulating or suggestive of vigor and force.
-in the “Brooklyn Eagle”:
At the Photo-Secession Gallery are some remarkable studies which are the result of the
evolution of thought, as regards art, in the mind of A. Walkowitz. The artist studied at the
Academy and painted in Paris and exhibited in Manhattan. His “early work,” as he calls the
collection of strong figures, is set around carelessly in the gallery, while the modern work, which
is on the scientific order, is hung on the walls. There is the suggestion of the old quarter of
Manhattan in one drawing—the thought of the moving throngs in the streets or the elevated
railways and teeming streets. Angles, curves and geometric figures are shown in the drawings,
which all tell a story to the initiated. One of the works, in color, which hangs in the gallery,
suggests a garden. When one paints something it is more or less mechanical, a copy; but
when one feels the scene in the heart and soul, one paints the living, breathing idea. It is an
effort to paint sound and wave undulation. The man Walkowitz is highly interesting; he is
sincere and is working for a definite feeling in art. Whether his theory that the present order
of drawing and painting that exists in his own mind, and is illustrated by his work at the Photo-

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