Calabi Gallery

Featuring an Eclectic Array of Primarily 20th Century Artwork

Anna Walinska

Romantic Landscape by Anna Walinska, 1928-30

Anna Walinska’s life and art spans the century of American modernism, paralleling the history of the New York school and the American Jewish experience. Known for her exhilarating joie de vivre, the irrepressible adventuress was born in London in 1906, moved to New York with her family in 1914, and by 1918 at the young age of 12 had begun her education at the Art Students League.

Walinska studied in Paris in the twenties with André L’Hote and at Grande Chaumiere, sponsored Arshile Gorky’s first one-man exhibit in New York in the thirties, and lived in Burma in the fifties. She was a painter, illustrator and teacher at the Master Institute of Arts in New York City, and taught painting at the Riverside Museum. Walinska served as assistant creative director of the Contemporary Art Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, and painted several portraits of artists including Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson. She was a member of the National Association of Women Artists, the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, and Artist’s Equity.

Walinska created more than two thousand works on canvas and works on paper over nine decades, including several hundred works on the theme of the Holocaust and a series inspired by the 17th century Japanese erotic Shunga prints, which she began at the age of 76.  Her work is found in numerous public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Since her death on December 19, 1997, there have been five one-woman exhibitions of her paintings, drawings and collages. Her work, Walinska wrote, “sought to convey the spirit of a search without boundaries.”

– From Anna Walinska Official Website

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