On Our Cover

Abraham Walkowitz liked series. He famously drew endless images of Isadora Duncan in motion (fig. 1). He may have retrofitted her innovative dance style onto Walt Whitman thanks to her enthusiasm for the poet—she was, he claimed, “the Walt Whitman of women” in that “her whole body became the bearer of the musical idea”—but his Duncan portraits certainly convey the physical exuberance of Whitman’s verse:¹

In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well asforward sluing,To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,Absorbing all to myself and for this song.²

Figure 1.

Abraham Walkowitz, Isadora Duncan (1909), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Whether he made the connection between the artists on his own or built from Duncan’s stated enthusiasm for Whitman matters less, I think, than Walkowitz’s experimentation with the creative possibilities of seriality and repetition.

Duncan was Walkowitz’s muse of choice, and his reputation suffered from the excessive (better, obsessive) attention he devoted to representing the remarkable dancer. “I suppose his drawings of the indefatigable Isadora number way up in the thousands,” contemporary Ralph Flint sniped. “Doubtless he does them in his sleep.”³ But Walkowitz’s commitment to serial representation is not limited to Isadora Duncan. He also executed an outstanding series of New York City, Improvisations of New York. The drawings and paintings—a symphony, he explained—depict the essential energy of a city where I once belonged.⁴ In these multiple Improvisations (they all have the same title), Walkowitz even more clearly engages with Whitman’s legacy, cataloging the city to convey a more expansive portrait of its (sometimes brutal) vitality.⁵

I knew none of the above when I first saw Walkowitz’s work. In November, Stacey proposed a black-and-white pencil drawing as a possible cover image (fig. 2). Our shorthand for this image was MOOD. The dense and chaotic energy of the drawing, its restlessness and disarray, offered a fine counterpoint to the graceful abundance of the Severin Roesen still life, and an exact representation of our sense of the moment. Only later did we learn that it was a drawing of New York City.

MOOD is not on our cover, obviously. In the end we had to opt for the more restrained Cityscape (1913). Here the frenzied lines of MOOD are somewhat subdued; modulations in the city’s density can be discerned as the packed crowds at the bottom of the image yield to the nestling regularity of the buildings that rise above, indeed tower over, the anonymous mass. Abstract structures still fill the pictorial space, but now there is room for light and air to circulate. To my eye, Cityscape is recognizably New York, and, as I’ve researched Walkowitz, my focus has turned to the crisis unfolding in a city that used to be mine. It matters to me now that it’s easy to see New York on our cover.

Walkowitz never achieved the fame for which he sometimes seemed destined. Born in Siberia in 1880, he emigrated with his mother and two sisters in 1889, settling on Essex Street in Lower Manhattan.⁶ Although his academic training ended early because the family needed for him to earn, Walkowitz managed to study art at Cooper Union, the Artists’ Institute, and the National Academy. Unenthusiastic about formal training— he dubbed his instructors “destructors”—Walkowitz nonetheless joined their ranks in 1900, teaching at the Educational Alliance; he began to exhibit his own art that same year.⁷ While his early pictures document Jewish life on the Lower East Side, a 1906 trip to Europe refocused his attention on the possibilities of abstraction. While there he also saw Duncan dance for the first time. As with many American artists across the long nineteenth century, his European experiences shaped his career.

Figure 2.

Abraham Walkowitz, Improvisations of New York (1914), Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.

Back in New York, Walkowitz experimented with new forms of expression and met with signal success. After...