Leon Berkowitz’s paintings have been likened to many of the great canvases of Abstract Expressionism, specifically those of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Berkowitz’s friend Morris Louis. In spite of these distinguished comparisons, Berkowitz remains a unique figure in modern American art. Though he remained affiliated with the New York painters, he forged a new group known as the Washington Color School along with Helmuth Kern and Ida Fox, a noted poet and Berkowitz’s wife. Moreover, in a period when many artists were transitioning to acrylic and other media, Berkowitz continued to paint in oils. Curator James McLaughlin notes that the painter’s canvases possessed “a visually seductive resonance and depth never achieved with the easier, more direct and immediate technique of acrylic sprays.”

Berkowitz was born in Philadelphia in 1919. He studied throughout the United States and Europe at institutions ranging from the University of Pennsylvania in his native Philadelphia to the Academie de Belles Artes in Florence. He and Morris Louis began their investigations into color in the 1950’s, studies that Berkowitz would continue for the rest of his career.

Inspired by the landscapes of Wales, Greece, and Israel, Berkowitz moved away from his early canvases that bordered on abstraction to fully non-representational work. As his studies of the rendering of light and color became more rigorous, the painter began to take cues, not only from contemporary painters like Helen Frankelthaler, but also from Old Masters, specifically Jan Vermeer. These influences, as well as his own personal research led him to statements like this one, simultaneously meticulous and spiritual: “Color is a vocabulary of feeling that evokes meaning and mood in those that meditatively view our work. But color, like words in a poem, needs its syntax, its grammar, and its form, so that it may extend its meaning to others.”

Leon Berkowitz’s paintings are included in many private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.