The exhibition "Line Dance: Abraham Walkowitz Drawings of Isadora Duncan" is the end result of many years of collaborative effort from many sources. The exhibition evaluates only one area of the work of Abraham Walkowitz (1878-1965), but it provides a good cross-section demonstrating his range and flexibility in approaching his subject--in this case Isadora Duncan-- both in objective and non-objective ways. The images of Isadora also provide visual information as to the one constant found within Walkowitz's works: the primacy of line in its many manifestations.

An important aspect of the exhibition is found in the preservation and restoration of the drawings themselves. In the course of conserving the pastels on colored paper, analytical testing was done on the papers by Joan Irving and Penley Knipe, respectively, Fellows in the Art Conservation Department, University of Delaware. Tentative dates could be assigned to the works through comparison of known dated works and their techniques, and through analysis of the papers themselves. An important discovery was that the colored papers were probably American in manufacture, made during the First World War, making a case for dating these works as early in Walkowitz's career, and certainly drawn during the lifetime of Isadora Duncan. This discovery was significant in that these colored papers are among some of the first such papers domestically produced. A pictorial demonstration of the painstaking conservation process on these colored papers and others aptly shows the discipline of art conservation, a unique blend of science and aesthetics.

One important result of compiling the exhibition was to assemble a significant aspect of the output of Abraham Walkowitz, and to examine it in the overall context of his standing as one of the first American Modernists. Through his many repetitions of Duncan, it is possible to create a chronology of sorts, and to observe how he put his theories on objective, non-objective, and abstract art into practice. The Duncan drawings are, by Walkowitz's own admission, his "calling cards," but he would often use the quickly sketched linear images of the dancer to demonstrate the directness and dynamism of movement.

Isadora, too, provides an interesting counterpart to Walkowitz in American modernism, and it is significant that she is featured in this exhibition. In many ways, she strives to present modernism in dance to a public not yet ready to relinquish the structural control imposed by ballet or other societally "acceptable" forms of dance. Both she and Walkowitz made repeated efforts to educate an American public openly hostile to or ridiculing of the new aesthetic.

Explored in the exhibition is the concept that modernism in art, like other movements, co-exists across disciplinary lines. To evaluate a visual artist in the context of a performing artist is nothing new. However, Walkowitz and Duncan were moving in parallel pathways. That Walkowitz chose to repeat images of Isadora to the point of visual obsession is not necessarily about unrequited love or some other romantic notion. Rather, it is possible that he recognized in her the physical embodiment of his aesthetic and artistic philosophy.

In any case, the central aim of the exhibition is to show a representative segment of the Isadora Duncan drawings by Abraham Walkowitz with the intention of re-evaluating both artists in light of their significant and often forgotten contributions to modernism in American art.

Janet Gardner Broske, Curator

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