Hubert Julian ('Jay') Stowitts, was an incredibly gifted dancer, artist, track letterman and student actor who attended the University of California, Berkeley from 1911-1915.
Upon graduation, the famed Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova spotted him at the Greek Theatre and invited him to join her troupe, whereupon he canceled his plans to attend graduate school at Harvard. For years he traveled as a successful dancer throughout the Americas and Europe, becoming the first American to star with a Russian ballet troupe. After a successful solo career, Stowitts retired from dancing at thirty-three and began a new career as a painter and occasional film actor. He traveled and lived in the Far East and South Asia in the late 1920s, where he produced a large series of 155 paintings he called "Vanishing India." At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, his exhibition of fifty-five paintings of nude male American athletes caused a sensation. The Nazis closed the exhibit down, mainly because it showed depictions of Jewish and African-American athletes. Stowitts died in 1953, leaving a legacy as an artist of dance, design, and painting. See bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/gaybears/stowitts.