The Anna Walinska Prize
Anna Walinska on the passenger ship Isle de France, 1926.
The Anna Walinska Prize was created by Rosina Rubin '76 to recognize outstanding student work in the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts at Brandeis University.
One award of $500 and several smaller awards are presented at the festival on the Brandeis University campus in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Anna Walinska's life and art spans the century of American modernism, paralleling the history of the New York school and the American Jewish experience. Known for her exhilarating joie de vivre, the irrepressible adventuress was born in London in 1906 to labor leader Ossip Walinsky and sculptor-poet-activist Rosa Newman Walinska. Anna studied at the Art Students League and in Paris. In 1935 she founded the Guild Art Gallery on West 57th Street in New York City, where she sponsored Arshile Gorky's first New York solo exhibition.
Walinska created more than 2,000 works on canvas and paper over nine decades, including several hundred works on the theme of the Holocaust and a series inspired by the 17th century Japanese erotic Shunga prints, which she began at the age of 76. Her portraits include Eleanor Roosevelt, Louise Nevelson, Arshile Gorky, and the prime minister of Burma, U Nu. Her work is found in numerous public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Yad Vashem in Israel. At Brandeis, her "Susanna and the Elders" (1959) and "Portrait of Justice Brandeis" (1943) are in the collection of the Rose Art Museum. "Young Woman Reading" (1932) and "Victim: Woman Reading (1953) are in the collection of the Women's Studies Research Center.
Leonard Bernstein, the founder of the Festival of the Creative Arts, believed that "the art of an era is a reflection of the society in which it is produced, and through creative endeavors the thoughts and expression which characterize each generation are revealed and transformed." In the spirit of Anna Walinska, Brandeis University celebrates the power of art and the imagination to inspire personal and social transformation.