Abraham Walkowitz was one of the first American painters to exhibit truly Modernist pictures in the United States. Born in Russia in 1878, Walkowitz grew up in New York and studied painting first in New York, and by 1906 was in Paris in time for the first visually explosive exhibitions of Modernist paintings. Back in New York, Walkowitz quickly became part of the avante garde circle of artists at legendary Alfred Steiglitz’s Gallery 291. He also exhibited in the 1913 Armory Exhibition in New York, a landmark show that first introduced an American audience to Modernism.

Walkowitz is described by his biographer William Innes Homer as having an "inventive sense of color... [that] found its freest, most intuitive expression in the medium of watercolor."

Works by Walkowitz are included in some 40 museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.