Not to be repeated

Jack Tworkov, the subject of a fascinating career retrospective at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, was one of those artists who was not interested in signature images. He seemed to regard self-doubt as a strength, rather than a weakness, and he was correspondingly good at changing aesthetic course.

“My hope is to confront the picture without a ready technique or a prepared attitude,’’ he wrote, “to have no program and, necessarily then, no preconceived style. To paint no Tworkovs.’’

Was he great? The answer — there’s no need to evade the question — is no, but it’s somehow of less moment than it might be in the context of this show and the courageous, insightful, talented man it celebrates.

Tworkov was born in 1900 in Biala, Poland, 50 miles southwest of Krakow. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 13. Although he enrolled in drawing classes at his high school on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, he was for many years more interested in writing, specifically poetry.

“I had to make up my mind that I wasn’t a writer,’’ he wrote. “I drifted into becoming an artist without ever making any really conscious decision.’’

Tworkov majored in English literature at Columbia University. The “drift’’ into painting — partly inspired by encounters with Matisse and Cézanne, and with American teachers such as Ivan Olinsky, Karl Knaths, and Guy Pène du Bois — led to a long association with Provincetown, beginning with a summer he spent there in 1923, and his first full year there in 1929.

“Iconoclastic rebellion was never Tworkov’s bent,’’ writes the art historian David Anfam in an essay in the show’s catalog. Tworkov himself was adamant that “Everyone who is an artist does it at the expense of being a hero.’’

This skepticism in the face of the heroic rhetoric that so defined his time was related, perhaps, to Tworkov’s own susceptibility to influence. And no bigger influence is evident in the early part of the show than that of his mentor Willem de Kooning.