Walkowitz X 130

Abraham Walkowitz, the world's most prolific portrait sitter, held an unusual one-man show last week--130 portraits of himself by 109 U.S. artists. (The show's official title, One Hundred Artists and Walkowitz, was a modest understatement.)

The walls of one of the main galleries of the Brooklyn Museum were all but concealed by Walkowitz in oil, watercolors, pen & ink, photography, stone and clay. There was Walkowitz in practically every artistic style known to history, Walkowitz by such top-flight U.S. artists ,and sculptors as Wayman Adams, Alexander Brook, Guy Pene Du Bois, Gifford Beal, Ernest Fiene, William Gropper, Joe Jones,

Morris Kantor, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Waldo Peirce, Raphael Soyer, Max Weber, William Zorach. There was even Walkowitz as Cyclops (by Adolph Gottlieb), a large green-and-ocher canvas in which Walkowitz looked like a giant grasshopper brooding over the canals of Mars. And there was Walkowitz (by Frank Kleinholz), entering the gates of heaven, and meeting St. Peter, who had also taken up painting and was doing an angel.

Endurance Record. Sitter Walkowitz himself considered his one-man show prodigious. "It has never been done before," he said, "and I doubt if it will ever be done again, because there will probably never be another Walkowitz with the . . . endurance ... to sit for 100 artists for a year." Walkowitz claims that it required 700 hours of sitting to produce his exhibition. The time in lost man-hours (he was invariably painted for nothing) cost him "numerous thousands of dollars." But he got into the situation before he realized it: "I said if I sat for two of my friends, I would sit for 50. Then I thought why not a hundred. . . . I am surprised at myself how I could do it. ... The catalogue of all the paintings will be like a textbook of art.. . . Everyone should see this show --artists, art students, psychologists. . . ."

Abraham Walkowitz, 64, is himself an artist, largely self-taught. Born in Russia, bred in Brooklyn, he is an uncompromising modernist, claims that he was the first modern artist in America. Until his current show, he was chiefly known for his 20-year series of some thousands of drawings of famed Dancer Isadora Duncan. To this day Artist Walkowitz will give one of these line drawings to anybody who he thinks has the right feeling about Isadora.

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