ABSTRACT
The exhibition of watercolors by the late Abraham Walkowitz at the Zabriskie Gallery is drawn entirely from the years 1900-20. Walkowitz was one of the painters who committed themselves very early to the modernist spirit, and thus had to look abroad for the means by which to realize it in their own work. But the first flowering of Walkowitz's talents came with his trip to Europe in 1906. For the bulk of the Zabriskie exhibition consists of a group of city scenes, from the period 1912-18, in which the momentum of New York life is given a most poetic and persuasive form. The crowds and skyscrapers, the romance of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the peculiar light of New York at night–these and other visual aspects of the New York scene enabled Walkowitz to bring to bear all he had learned from the modern movement in Europe.
