This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Largely a painter known for his busy, impressionistic scenes of life on
the streets of Paris, Abel Warshawsky spent about thirty years in
France. He mastered two styles: his own variant of French
impressionism and a striking realism, which he applied to his many
penetrating and superb portraits. While his street scenes are
modern in their depiction of boisterous, fleeting contemporary
activity, the portraits embody the spirit of Old Europe. Their
sincerity and integrity have a counterpart in the portraits of Charles
W. Hawthorne, the great teacher of Provincetown. In spite of
their debt to the doctrines of late nineteenth-century French
naturalism, Warshawsky’s portraits have more distant roots. Woman of Finistère
(Sweat Art Museum, Portland, Maine) might easily recall Frans Hals, and
others evoke that German insistence on clearly delineated facial
features — that Düreresque accuracy — employed to define the sitter’s
personality as well as his or her physiognomy.
Warshawsky, born in Sharon, Pennsylvania on 28 December 1883, was
raised in Cleveland. He began his studies at the Cleveland Art
Institute under Frederick Carl Gottwald, whom Gerdts (1990, vol. 2, p.
221) calls “the principal exponent in Cleveland of Impressionism and
Post-Impressionism.” Then the artist went to the Art Students
League and the National Academy of Design in New York: as teachers he
listed H. Siddons Mowbray, Louis Loeb, and Winslow Homer. Loeb,
known as an illustrator for Harper’s and The Century, probably helped
Warshawsky to get hired at Harper’s. Having been a student of
Gérôme in 1890-91, Loeb may have influenced Warshawsky to go to Paris
in 1909. As for Homer, Nelson (1926, p. 79) clarified that
Warshawsky went only “occasionally for criticism to Winslow Homer, who
in his old age was ever the soul of generosity in his critical attitude
toward the younger painters in search of advice.”
Warshawsky’s most impressionistic works, technically speaking, show
broken color and its shimmering effects, especially in bright sunlight,
for example, The Artist’s Garden in Brittany in a private
collection. Serenity features indications of dappled light with a
heavy impasto à la Renoir. Anne Gertrude Richards (1916, p. 169)
compares the effect to works by Frederick Frieseke, Lawton Parker, and
Louis Ritman. Most often, however, as Edward Alden Jewell
explained, Warshawsky developed “a brush manner that appears to have
grown more or less directly out of impressionism. . . . Warshawsky does
not adhere to the characteristic impressionist stroke technique [but
the] atmospheric shimmer . . . brings impressionism to mind.” (Quoted
in Art Digest, 1 March 1940, p. 19). Like many
twentieth-century impressionists, Warshawsky maintained the
impressionist’s favorite subject matter, urban life, but later
abandoned the closely juxtaposed, regular brushstrokes for broad areas
of color. His bird’s-eye views of the boulevards of Paris recall
Monet’s famous Boulevard des Capucines (1873; Nelson-Atkins Museum of
Art, Kansas City, Missouri), complete with “tongue-lickings” to
represent pedestrians, and some of his works are highly
impressionistic. Washer Women at Goyen (1917; Cleveland
Museum of Art) is especially stunning with its limited palette of green
and violet, its expressive use of controlled impasto, the delicate
surfaces of the building, rendered all in violet, and the freely
painted ripples of water below.
Warshawsky’s The Memories of an American Impressionist, written
in 1931, describes an American artist’s life in Paris, ca. 1909 to
1930. His preferred hangout was the Café du Dôme on the boulevard
Montparnasse, where “meeting one’s fellow craftsmen — talking shop, and
exchanging ideas in general — was the main diversion (Warshawsky, 1931,
p. 109). At the Dôme, Warshawsky met Richard Emil Miller, Lionel
Walden, Max Bohm, Frederick Frieseke, Lawton Parker, Louis Ritman, the
modernists Alfred Maurer, John Marin, Jules Pascin and Signac: in
short, more than a handful of expatriates who made the Café du Dôme
their lively art club, intellectual hub, and social center.
Warshawsky painted at Vernon, not far from Giverny; the accommodations
were cheaper than those at Giverny: “Vernon had a spacious and
unspoiled air, with its wide river, lovely old moss-covered bridge on
graceful arches, distant hills with . . . chalk cliffs showing through
at happy intervals. . . .” (Warshawsky, 1931, p. 97). Later he
was joined by Leon Kroll, Ivan Olinsky, and Samuel Halpert.
During the war years, Warshawsky volunteered to manage a labor squad at
a supply warehouse. Warshawsky packed all of the 1920s into the
last chapter. The crowd at the Café du Dôme had become “a hard
drinking lot,” while rents were rising, and back home, artists were
beginning to share in the general prosperity. The relentless heat
of the Midwest, lingering “Victorian” dress codes, and Prohibition
drove Warshawsky back to France, where he was made a chevalier of the
Légion d’Honneur. For a while, he was involved with the artists’
colony on the Spanish island of Mallorca, where fellow Americans Conrad
Albrizio, Ronald Hargrave, Alex Bower Schofield and others gathered in
the 1920s. The events of the second world war made it necessary for
Warshawsky to return to the States; he settled on the Monterey
Peninsula and was active in the Carmel Art Association. According
to Edan Milton Hughes, Warshawsky referred to himself as a “classical
impressionist.” The artist died in Monterey on 31 May 1962.
Submitted by Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D.
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A Cleveland Impressionist landscape painter, Abel Warshawsky left Cleveland for New York in 1905 and then spent some years in Paris as an expatriate. In 1910, he returned to Cleveland where he taught art with William Sommer and exhibited paintings continuously through the 1940s.
He was born on December 28, 1883, in Sharon, Pennsylvania, though he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied with Louis Rorimer at the Cleveland Art Institute, with additional work at the Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design, the latter two institutions in New York City, where Warshawsky went in 1905. The artist traveled to Paris in 1908, where he met Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Signac and Auguste Renoir, as well as American artists Winslow Homer, Leon Kroll, Hugo Robus and William Zorach. Though he returned to Cleveland in 1910, where he was a member of the Cincinnati Art Club and taught with William Sommer, he maintained a studio in Paris for thirty years, and was quite active in the art world there. He traveled often through France and Italy, returning on a yearly basis to the United States to sell his work, exhibiting from the 1910s to the 1950s.
With the death of his first wife, and war threatening in the 1930s, Warshawsky left Europe, building a studio in Monterrey, California, teaching classes, painting portraits, and figures against the backdrop of the Northern California coastline. Warshawsky, a member and president of the Carmel Art Association, was a painting partner and friend of California artist Sidney Sargent Freeman.
Warshawsky painted portraits of John W. (Jack) Raper, 1870-1950, a columnist for "The Cleveland Press" in 1940, and his brother David, 1893-1989, in 1944 in Taxco, Mexico, which are in the collection of the City Club of Cleveland. The latter was a gift to the collection by the sitter's son and his wife, David and Lee Warshawsky. Abel Warshawsky's younger brother, Alexander L. Warshawsky, 1887-1945, was also a painter.
Abel Warshawsky has five paintings in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as work in the Minneapolis Art Institute, Minnesota; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; and the Luxembourg Museum, Paris, France.
The 1920 portrait of his wife, titled "Paris Unconquered," is set against a background vista of that city. The painting served as the frontispiece of his book of the same title, published in 1957. "Memories of an American Impressionist", a book about Abel G. Warshawsky, edited by Ben L. Bassham, was published by Kent State University Press, in 1980. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure's article, "Abel Warshawsky," appeared in Art of California, in September 1990. His work was part of the exhibition, in 2002, "The Many Faces of Cleveland: A Century of Portraiture", at the Cleveland Artists Foundation.
Abel Warshawsky died in 1962.
His papers from 1930-1960 are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. They include a manuscript of the artist's unpublished autobiography, "My Brush With Life," as well as typescripts of two versions of Warshawksy's autobiography, "The Autobiography," and "Adventures with Color and Brush," which is a revision of the former, ending in 1941. Letters to his second wife, Ruth; six albums of photographs of artwork; sketchbooks and miscellaneous other materials are also included.
Source:
http://www.treadwaygallery.com/ONLINECATALOGS/June2002/paintsession/catpages/0439.html
http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/3aa/3aa212.htm
http://www.cityclub.org/content/Services/index/artwork.asp
http://bookmasters.com/ksu-press/ksu001.htm
http://home.earthlink.net/nancymoure/
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania on December 28, 1883, Warshawsky spent his youth in Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from the Art Institute there. At 17, he won a scholarship which took him to New York City where he continued his studies at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design under Loeb and Homer.
He traveled to Paris for further study and became so enchanted with France that he spent the next 30 years there and gained great renown. For his contribution to the arts there he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor and a member of the French Society of Intellectuals. With WWII threatening, he left France and settled in Monterey, California. He died there of heart failure on May 30, 1962.
Member:
Cincinnati Art Club; Paris Allied AA; Carmel AA.
Exh: Salon D'Automne (Paris); NAD; Cleveland, 1914 (1st solo in U.S.); Braun Galllery (NYC), 1916; American AA of Paris (NYC), 1922; Anderson Gallery (Chicago), 1923; Rembrandt Gallery (NYC), 1925; Stendahl Gallery (LA), 1940; Gump's (SF), 1942.
In: Frye Museum (Seattle); De Saisset Museum (Santa Clara); CPLH; Akron Art Institute; Cleveland Museum; CGA; Minneapolis Art Institute; San Diego Museum; Monterey Peninsula Museum; Luxembourg Museum (Paris); De Young Museum; Petit Palais (Paris); LACMA. | Source:
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
Who's Who in American Art 1936-41; Artists of the American West (Doris Dawdy); Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers (Fielding, Mantle); Who's Who on the Pacific Coast; Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs, et Graveurs (Bénézit, E); Who's Who in America; SF Chronicle, 6-1-1962 (obituary). | | Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here. |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Landscape and portrait painter. Born in Sharon, PA on Dec. 28, 1883. His brother Alexander Warshawsky was also an artist. Abel George Warshawsky spent his youth in Cleveland, OH and graduated from the Art Institute there. At 17 he won a scholarship which took him to NYC where he continued his studies at the ASL and NAD under Loeb and Homer. He traveled to Paris for further study and became so enchanted with France that he spent the next 30 years there and gained great renown. For his contribution to the arts there he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor and a member of the French Society of Intellectuals. With WWII threatening, he left France and settled in Monterey, CA. He died there of heart failure on May 30, 1962.
| Source:
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
WWAA 1936-41; AAW; Fld; WWPC; Ben; WWA; SF Chronicle, 6-1-1962 (obit) | | Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here. |
Biography from William A. Karges Fine Art - Beverly Hills:
| Abel Warshawsky was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, in 1883, and was
raised in Cleveland where he studied at the local Art Institute. He
continued his studies in New York at the Art Students League and
National Academy of Design, before leaving for France, where he would
enjoy tremendous success, and remain until the onset of WW II.
Returning to the States, Warshawsky settled in Carmel, where he died in
1962, best remembered for his pure Impressionist landscapes. |
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