Anna Walinska
1906-1997

Anna Walinska was born in London in 1906. She was the daughter of labor leader Ossip Walinsky and sculptor-poet Rosa Newman Walinska, Russian immigrants who moved the family to New York in 1914.

Walinska studied in New York at the Art Students League and in Paris with André Lhote and at the Grande Chaumiere. She lived on and off in Paris from 1926-1930.

In 1935, Walinska founded the Guild Art Gallery on West 57th Street, where she gave Arshile Gorky his first New York one-man show and exhibited the work of Raphael Soyer, Theodore Roszak, Boris Aronson and Chaim Gross, among others. She served as assistant creative director of the Contemporary Art Pavillion at the 1939 World’s Fair, appeared in the Yiddish Theatre, danced with a Flamenco troupe, and taught painting at the Riverside Museum.

In 1955, Walinska traveled around the world, including a four-month stay in Burma, where she painted the portrait of Prime Minister U Nu (now in the collection of the Asia Society in New York). Other portraits by Walinska in public collections include those of Gorky (the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Johnson Museum at Cornell); Mark Rothko (the National Portrait Gallery and the Magnes Museum in Berkeley); and Louise Nevelson (the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Magnes). Works by Walinska are also housed in the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Zimmerli Museum at Princeton University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and other prestigious collections in the U.S. and abroad.

Walinska received two major one-woman retrospectives during her life: the first at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1957; the second at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an exhibition of 122 works on canvas and paper on the theme of the Holocaust. Her work was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and numerous galleries from Madison Avenue to Soho. She was a member of the National Association of Women Artists, the Federation of Modern Painters & Sculptors, and Artist’s Equity.

By the time of her death, Walinska had produced more than 2000 works on canvas and paper, created with oil, watercolor, charcoal, pastel, casein, ink, assemblage, and any combination of materials that intrigued her. From her early figurative black & white line drawings and colorful cubist paintings, to her later abstract expressionist canvases and watercolors inspired by the 17th century Japanese Shunga prints, to her focus on the Holocaust toward the end of her career, Walinska’s constantly explored new ways to express herself artistically.

Posthumously, Walinska’s work is finding a new audience through galleries such as Papillon Gallery in Los Angeles, which has reintroduced the artist’s early Modernist work to the public, and via six one-woman exhibitions held in such diverse locations as New York City; Birmingham, Alabama; and the Czech Republic.

Looking back on her life, Anna Walinska once said that going to live and study in Paris at the age of 19 was “indicative of a certain kind of daring and adventurousness that I’ve always had.”

Biography courtesy of Rosina Rubin.