03 Paintings, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Isadora Duncan, with Footnotes. #60

Abraham Walkowitz, American, 1878-1965 

Isadora Duncan 

Watercolor, ink and graphite on paper 

13 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches

Private collection

Angela Isadora Duncan (May 26, 1877 or May 27, 1878 – September 14, 1927) was an American and French dancer who performed to acclaim throughout Europe. Born in California, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50, when her scarf became entangled in the wheels and axle of the car in which she was riding.

Isadora was born in 1877 in San Francisco and moved to Europe to become a dancer when she was in her early 20s. She had always loved to dance–in her teens, she worked as a dance teacher at her mother’s music school–but Duncan was not a classically trained ballerina. She was a free-spirited bohemian whose dances were improvisational and emotional; they were choreographed, she said, “to rediscover the beautiful, rhythmical motions of the human body.” Duncan typically danced barefoot, wrapped in flowing togas and scarves. Duncan’s performances celebrated independence and self-expression.

Duncan was a feminist and a Darwinist, an advocate of free love and a Communist. (For this, her American citizenship was revoked in the early 1920s.)  More on Angela Isadora Duncan

Abraham Walkowitz,  (1878–1965)

Isadora Duncan #29, c. circa 1915

Watercolor and ink over graphite on off-white, medium-weight, moderately textured laid paper

35.6 × 47 cm (14 × 18.5 ″)

Brooklyn Museum

Abraham Walkowitz (March 28, 1878 - January 27, 1965) was an American painter grouped in with early American Modernists working in the Modernist style.

Walkowitz was born in Tyumen, Siberia. He emigrated with his mother to the United States in his early childhood. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City and the Académie Julian in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens. Walkowitz and his contemporaries later gravitated around photographer Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery, originally titled the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, where the forerunners of modern art in America gathered and where many European artists were first exhibited in the United States. 

Abraham Walkowitz, American, 1878-1965 

Isadora Duncan 

Watercolor, ink and graphite on paper

Private collection

Through introductions made by Max Weber, it was in Paris that he met Isadora Duncan in Auguste Rodin's studio, the modern American dancer who had captured the attention of the avant-garde. Walkowitz went on to produce more than 5,000 drawings of Duncan.

While never attaining the same level of fame as his contemporaries, Walkowitz' close relationship with the 291 Gallery and Alfred Stieglitz placed him at the center of the modernist movement. His early abstract cityscapes and collection of over 5,000 drawings of Isadora Duncan also remain significant art historical records. More on Abraham Walkowitz

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