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Abstract
In 1948, Russian-American painter Abraham Walkowitz (1878-1965) published his Manhattan cityscape series in a retrospective illustrated compilation entitled Improvisations of New York: A Symphony in Lines. Although decades past the titular series’ inception, Walkowitz and his publisher friend Emanuel Haldeman-Julius issued the short book in response to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in America so as to assert the artist as an early pioneer within a lineage of abstraction. The series, and Walkowitz’s abstract visual language, emerged during a period of aesthetic discourse on the plastic arts’ relationship to music in the years surrounding the seminal Armory Show of 1913. This thesis argues that Walkowitz was a significant figure in this interdisciplinary conversation and developed how own abstract idioms, applying these new methods of expression to the premiere urban metropolis in order to communicate sensations unique to his contemporary moment.