My Favorite Aunt Was A Bold Artist Ahead of Her Time

The woman I called Auntie Anna — Anna Walinska — passed away in 1997 at the age of 91, the last occupant of the large rent stabilized Upper West Side apartment where several generations of our family resided since the early 1940’s. 

Art was everywhere – hung salon style throughout, crammed into metal racks filling what had once been my grandfather’s bedroom, leaning against the walls of another bedroom that had become her working studio in later years, in flat files under the dining room table and on high closet shelves in still-sealed boxes from her life in 1920’s Paris. 

There were canvases wrapped in dusty bubble wrap and works on paper in cheap metal frames under plexiglass that called for cleaning several times over.  I was familiar with her mid-career abstract work, mostly in a black-and-white palette, but had never seen most of the accumulated early line drawings, colorful pastel scenes, portraits of artist friends and political leaders, and creations made with spray paint or handmade Burmese Shan paper. 

In total, Anna Walinska left nearly 2000 works on canvas and paper and a Last Will and Testament that was so complex, it could could be used in an estate law class to illustrate how not to write an artist’s will. 

Among her instructions was the wish that her works on the theme of the Holocaust be given to a single institution that would exhibit them in their entirety. I asked the attorney who wrote the document if he knew how many paintings and drawings she was talking about and if she had left a substantial sum to provide a willing institution with the resources to build a wing to house them. The answer to both questions was no. The estate appraiser looked around and suggested that if I could count and categorize it myself, it would save money.

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My father died when I was a child, and my aunt became like a second parent.  She often told me that I could do anything, that someday I was going to do something important.  When I was young, I thought this was what everyone told their children. The women in my family were seemingly fearless. My grandmother came from Ukraine, worked in sweatshops, and became a poet, sculptor and activist.  My mother was the youngest of three, danced with Martha Graham in her youth, and went to work as a secretary at the age of 49 to take care of two young girls.  

My aunt, the eldest, studied at the Art Students League at the age of 12, disheartened that she was not allowed into life drawing class. At 19, she persuaded her father’s boss to finance a year in Paris at the height of the “moveable feast,” took up residence on the Left Bank around the corner from Gertrude Stein, and studied with Andre L’Hote at La Grande Chaumiere.  Though she made a sweet drawing of Picasso in a cafe, she generally shied away from the artists’ scene, preferring the world of musicians Poulenc and Schoenberg, visits to Longchamps to watch horse racing, and trips to Galleries Lafayette in search of inexpensive fabric to drape in themis en scene of her still life paintings. In the 1950’s, impatient to set off on a six-month journey around the world, she passed on a request from Guggenheim Director James Johnson Sweeney to visit her studio. I have occasionally wondered how things might have turned out if she had made a different choice at what seemed to be the height of her career.  Perhaps a visit from Sweeney would have led to something momentous.  On the other hand, had she not opted for exploration, she would have missed out on creative influences and experiences that informed her practice for the rest of her life.

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It took me 10 months to touch every piece of art in the apartment.  I tried to figure out what was most important to photograph – in 35mm back then – found a place to store it all and started creating records in a database.  A good number of the works were un-dated, apparently intentional, as legend had it that my aunt didn’t want people to know how old she was.  In time, she became proud of her longevity and started introducing herself to strangers at parties, saying, “hello, I’m Anna.  I’m 85.”

At the time of her death, it had been a decade since Walinska’s work had been featured in an exhibition. But beginning in the 1930’s with her inclusion in the first exhibition of the American Artists Congress and peaking in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she enjoyed a creative heyday that included a solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and participation in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, New York’s legendary Bodley Gallery and Le Chateau de la Napoule in France.

Her work was shown alongside Marc Chagall, Arshile Gorky, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Louise Nevelson, Alice Neel, Andy Warhol and others whose work and names have become far better known than her own. She founded the Guild Art Gallery on West 57th Street where she gave Gorky his first New York solo exhibition in the midst of the Depression, and traveled the world.

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I didn’t know much about the art world, other than what I absorbed because my aunt’s idea of babysitting was taking us to a museum and teaching us to recognize a Matisse or Picasso. I took Art 101 my freshman year of college, back when no women were included in the textbooks.  

Auntie Anna came to my fifth-grade class to teach everyone how to make collages and saved a folder of thank you letters the teacher required us to write.  When we got older, she took us to “happenings” at galleries in Soho.  Later we would occasionally meet at MoMA during lunch breaks from my job at a midtown television network.  

I knew a little about my aunt’s process, having been required in my youth to sit still for hours in her studio while she sketched me and my sister.  That was a responsibility we inherited from my mother, who had been the original muse, drawn as a young woman reading, dressed in costumes, and posed with the piano, guitar and violin (none of which she played).  

When she was in her final days, my aunt told me that she was not afraid to die but that she needed my help. I hadn’t really understood what she meant then, but I was now aware I had much work to do.

On an almost daily basis, I found myself back in the home where I lived with my parents, my grandfather and my aunt until my baby sister came along and we moved a few blocks away on my 4th birthday. Standing in the long entrance hallway, I wondered what had become of the Portrait of Anna Walinska by Gorky, given to her as a gift after she released him from his contract at her gallery, convinced that dealer Julian Levy could better support the artist’s creative and financial needs.  

She sold the portrait and another large Gorky canvas when her building went co-op in the late 1970’s, thinking she would need funds to buy her apartment. She never made the purchase because the New York City Council passed a non-eviction clause for senior citizens. (The whereabouts of this cherished work remained unknown until 2023, when it turned up in Rhode Island and was photographed for the Gorky catalogue raisonné). Sitting in the living room, I had vivid memories of Nevelson’s visits and wished I could remember anything she and my aunt said to each other as I followed them around like a curious puppy.  Ahead of me lay a trip through family history, an education in the “isms” as my aunt sometimes referred to the different movements within modern of art, and a personal journey that I never imagined.

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I visited the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. There, I learned of her diaries, particularly those from the trip where she visited 15 countries in 183 days from November 1954 to May 1955, including a four-month sojourn in Burma.  After painting the portrait of Burmese Prime Minister U Nu (she worked in a proper dress and heels), his secretary U Thant (later Secretary General of the United Nations) sent her off to India with a letter of introduction to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru was away from home at the time of her visit; his staff asked the artist to stay until their leader returned.  She declined because she wanted to get home in time for me to be born.  It felt like no accident that I had become the one to shine the light on her legacy.

At the time of Walinska’s passing, conventional wisdom said that it was difficult to re-emerge an artist who was not exhibiting at the time of their death. Some went so far as to add that it was especially difficult if that artist was a woman. One male gallerist told me that the art world only had bandwidth for one woman artist at a time. The most polite thing I can say about all of this is that it was inspirational.

Eventually someone told me that if I was determined to take on the challenge of bringing my aunt’s life’s work to a new audience, I should try to find historical context. 

The exhibit HOLOCAUST: Paintings & Drawings, 1953-1978 made its debut at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1979, before there were museums across the country commemorating the unspeakable tragedy.  Including 93 works on canvas and paper by Walinska, it was at the time (and perhaps still is) the largest solo artist exhibition staged at the Cathedral, which sits just north on Amsterdam Avenue from Columbia University.  

Some people wondered at the time why an artist who had not been interned in the camps would choose to make these paintings and drawings, especially an artist who had a strong exhibition history and was certainly not going to advance her commercial prospects by identifying herself with the themes depicted on the Cathedral’s walls – Victims, Survivors, The Earth Bears Witness, Elegy, the Naked & the Dead. I recall thinking that these were not paintings that people were likely to take home and hang over their living room sofa. Fortunately, the Cathedral’s Dean James Parks Morton, a lifelong proponent of interfaith dialogue, took a different view and understood their importance, not only to the artist but to the community he served.

I decided that placing the Holocaust works in as many public collections as possible, and endeavoring to assure that they would be exhibited, was as close as I could come to the directive articulated in her will. 

Many decades since their public debut, curators are bringing this work to the forefront.  A large oil on paper mounted on masonite  – Crucifixion: Homage to Tintoretto, 1963 – was recently displayed can be seen in the sanctuary of St. John the Divine in an exhibition titled Divine Representation: Women in the Cathedral’s Collection. Survivors: Exodus, 1958, one of the largest canvases painted by Walinska, is at the center of a Holocaust retrospective graced the cover of the catalogue for Remembrance & Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970 at the Eskenazi Museum in Bloomington, Indiana.

And yet, while this work had tremendous importance to her, it was not all she was as an artist. Her work persists elsewhere–her Self-Portrait: Flamenco (1939) joined the Hudson River Museum’s permanent collection and currently hangs on its walls, telling the story of her appearance at Town Hall to benefit the Loyalist fight in the Spanish Civil War, accompanied by renowned guitarist Carlos Montoya. 

I think of her often in the months between the anniversaries of her birth in September and her passing in December.  I have visited the places where she lived and studied in Paris a century ago. And perhaps one day I will have the joy of heading off the beaten path to wander in her footsteps farther from home.  

The memories are strong of her unforgettable stories, generosity in nurturing others (myself especially), and her spectacular hats (a few of which I still have sitting in my closet).  Hers was a life well lived — like the collages she worked on for the better part of 91 years – a patchwork of the everyday and the unique, pulled together into something larger with a deeper meaning.  

In 1975, inspired by International Women’s Year, Anna Walinska wrote a letter to Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, urging that it was time for an exhibition celebrating the achievements of 20th century women artists.  He replied that the Met didn’t have room on their calendar.

She loved being around young people, so no doubt she would applaud that half a century later, so many women are making their way to the upper echelons of museum and gallery hierarchies–and her own work has found new appreciators across the generations. 

— Rosina Rubin founded Atelier Anna Walinska, to catalogue and exhibit the work of her late aunt, painter Anna Walinska(1906-1997).

Anna Walinska & Her Circle at the Art Students League runs through May 24.