Born to a family of Polish immigrants in Sharon, Pennsylvania, Abel Warshawsky moved with his parents to Cleveland in the early 1890s. He studied with Louis Rorimer and Frederick Gottwald at the Cleveland School of Art, 1900–05. After graduating, he attended the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design in New York. In the summer of 1907 he met Winslow Homer while painting in Prout’s Neck, Maine. Warshawsky returned to Cleveland that fall and taught night classes at the Jewish Council for Education Alliance, a settlement house, where his students included William Zorach and Max Kalish. The following year, Warshawsky received funds from Rorimer to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. From 1908 to 1910, he painted outdoor, impressionist studies in Paris and Brittany. When Warshawsky returned to Cleveland in the fall of 1910, he exhibited his new paintings at Rorimer’ s studio, in the Cleveland “secessionists” exhibitions held at the Rowfant Club (1912), and at the Korner & Wood Galleries (1912). He traveled to Paris in the spring of 1911, where he associated with Zorach and Hugo Robus. Warshawsky returned briefly to Cleveland and exhibited at the Gage Galleries in December 1913. He exhibited in the annuals of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1914–17) and was featured in a solo exhibition at the Cleveland School of Art (1916). He spent 24 years living in France but returned frequently to exhibit and visit his family in Cleveland. The Cleveland Museum of Art organized a solo exhibition of his paintings (1920). In the 1930s he exhibited in Washington, D.C., and New York. In 1939, forced by World War II to leave France, Warshawsky returned to the United States and settled in Monterey, California.
