Anna WALINSKA (1906-1997) was a woman ahead of her time.

 

At the age of 19, she left NYC for Paris to study painting, lived around the corner from Gertrude Stein, and hung out with Poulenc and Schoenberg.

 

In the WPA era, she founded a gallery on 57th Street, gave Arshile Gorky his first NYC one-man show, danced flamenco at Town Hall to benefit the Spanish Loyalistas, and served as Assistant Creative Director of the Contemporary Art Pavillion at the 1939 New York World's Fair.  

 

In the fifties, she traveled around the world ... by herself ... on prop planes.  Her diary of that six-month journey now resides in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and includes stories about her adventures with journalist Joseph Alsop, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu, and many other writers, artists and diplomats.

 

Walinska's paintings have been shown at the Salon des Independents in Paris, in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Jewish Museum (one-woman retrospective), the Baltimore Museum of Art, and other prestigious venues in the U.S. and abroad. 

Paintings and drawings by Walinska are included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, the Johnson Museum at Cornell, the Zimmerli at Rutgers, the Magnes Museum, the Clark University Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem & the Tel Aviv Art Museum.  

Her work, Walinska wrote, "sought to convey the spirit of a search without boundaries."