Background
Leon Berkowitz was born on September 14, 1919, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
University of Pennsylvania
Leon Berkowitz was born on September 14, 1919, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Leon Berkowitz studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the Art Students League in New York, and in Paris, Florence, and Mexico City.
During World War II Leon Berkowitz was in the Army, stationed in Virginia, and in 1945, after completing his military service, he moved to Washington, D.C. With his first wife, the poet Ira Fox Berkowitz, Leon Berkowitz established the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in 1945. That Center became a cultural catalyst in the city, bringing together leaders in both the performing and visual arts, including painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis, who would later become well-known founders of the Washington Color School group. The Workshop Center closed in 1956, and Berkowitz and his wife spent much of the next decade traveling and living abroad, primarily in Spain and Wales.
It was during this sabbatical from his life in Washington that his painting took a new direction, and it is this late work for which he is best known. He painted and taught art for more than ten years in Washington high schools and later, in 1969, at The Corcoran Gallery’s School of Art, where he was chairman of the painting department. He continued to teach there for almost twenty years. He taught at various times at American University, Catholic University, and the Art League of Northern Virginia in Alexandria.
By the 1970s, Berkowitz’s paintings had become completely abstract, suffused with mists of color and light. Though he was often associated with the Color School painters, he vigorously denied that connection, asserting instead that his floating washes of color carried light, and through light, a spiritual presence. And, indeed, the intense white ground used to prime his canvases radiates light, creating a luminous, color-drenched atmospheric effect. Leon Berkowitz died of cancer in 1987 at his home in Washington.
A.M. No. 4
Algonquit Series #12
Solomon's Temple
Cathedral #18a
Up Green
Corona #7
Untitled
Cup #7
Duality #15
Oblique #7
Source #3
Chanakuh #3
Source #7
Atmospheric Abstraction
Untitled
Pendant-Green
With In
Cathedral #22
Cathedral #5
Unities #60
Cathedral #11
I Thou
Big Blue
Seven Lights Series
Cathedral #16
Big Bend V
Dark Light Rose Gold
Untitled
After the Cloud
Vertical #7
Innisphere
Leon emphasized the influence of poetry, music, and physics in his work over formalistic concerns. Berkowitz was never comfortable with the abstract expressionist painters' dependence on internal psychological states. Berkowitz felt he needed to take inspiration from some external authority, rather than an exclusively internal one.
Quotations: “I am endeavoring to find that blush of light over light and the color within the light; the depths through which we see when we look into and not at color.”
Painter Leon Berkowitz was a founding member of the Washington Color School.
Leon's first wife was the poet Ira Fox Berkowitz. Then he married Maureen Berkowitz.
