Abel G. Warshawsky

Impressionist painter A.G. Warshawsky was active in Cleveland, Paris and Monterey, California. Although Warshawsky is known as a classic Impressionist, he is also known for using a realistic style in his portraiture.

Warshawsky was born in 1883 in Sharon, Pennsylvania to Ezekial and Ida Warshawsky, Jewish immigrants from Poland. The family then moved to Cleveland, Ohio. His brother Alexander (Xander) also became an accomplished painter in his own right.

Warshawsky graduated from the Cleveland School of Art in 1900, taught by Louis Rorimer and Frederick Gottwald. He then received a scholarship and studied art in New York at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design.

In 1908, he went to Paris to study, and stayed there for thirty years, splitting his time in between Paris and Brittany. It was there that he married his first wife, Valentine Laudell, in 1910, only later to divorce in 1926.

Both Warshawsky and his brother Alexander worked behind French lines during the first World War, decorating soldier huts and organizing events.

Warshawsky was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in the 1920s and a member of the French Society of Intellectuals, testament to the world’s high regard for his artistic talents and accomplishments.

Warshawsky was forced to return to New York after the death of his second wife Minnie in 1935 and as the Nazi regime took over Europe and entered France. Warshawsky moved and finally settled in Monterey, California, where he met and married his third wife, Ruth.

Abel Warshawsky died of heart failure in 1962 in Monterey. By the time of his death, Warshawsky had been featured in over 85 solo exhibitions and his work had been collected in over 200 museums. One of those museums being the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In 1980, Helen Cullinan reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Warshawsky was “perhaps the most phenomenally successful artist that Cleveland has ever produced.”