Leon Berkowitz

(1919-1987)

Although Leon Berkowitz is most frequently associated with Washington D.C., where he spent a large period of his life, he received his education across a wide range of institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Art Students League in New York, and academies across Paris, Florence, and Mexico City. In 1945, Berkowitz established the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, which became an important platform for creative production and dialogue across the visual and performing arts, bringing together acclaimed and emerging artists from across Washington and New York, among other locales. Through its participants the Center would become closely associated with the development of the Washington Color School, as an extension of Color Field Painting. Although he played a pivotal role in the founding of the group, Berkowitz would, throughout his career, eschew the positioning of his work within that movement, noting his commitment to capturing the poetics of color over the formal inquiries of the group.

Berkowitz’s early works combined loose figurative elements with inspirations from some of the most important artists of the time, including Morris Louis, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, as he experimented and honed his own approach and style. Following the closing of the Center in 1956, Berkowitz moved abroad, where he would spend the next decade living and traveling. It was during this time that Berkowitz cemented his commitment to evoking the emotional resonance of color and light within the surface plane. By the 1970s, his works had become entirely abstract, characterized by both vibrant bursts of color and subtle gradations of light and hue. Berkowitz’s fascination