New York

Walkkowitz, who immigrated from small-town Siberia to the United States in 1889, was fascinated by the size, scale, crowds, and dynamism of New York. As a young artist, he sought to capture the city’s energy in a long series of frenetic drawings he made in the years around 1910. Those works, which began as recognizable cityscapes, verged ever closer to complete abstraction as Walkowitz sought to capture the motion and three-dimensional life of the city on a two-dimensional surface. This collage, which was clearly assembled over many years, as it includes drawings from the 1910s and postcards from the 1930s, shares a similar impulse. Yet it stands apart from those drawings, both in its complexity and for its inclusion of commericially produced postcards of New York. The printed cards define the "city," and the people, drawn in pen and ink, occupy the dense and crowded “street” between the cards. Those wriggling figures seem to become undifferentiated members of the great urban mass, but they also seem to have a whiff of the divine, recalling in a way the hosts of angels and seraphim in drawings by William Blake.