Work
Despite his objections, Weinman is still best remembered as the designer of the Walking Liberty Half Dollar (a design now used for the obverse of the American Silver Eagle one-ounce bullion coin) and the "Mercury" dime along with various medals for the Armed Services of the United States. Among these are the identical reverses of the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and the American Campaign Medal. Weinman was one of many sculptors and artists who employed Audrey Munson as a model.
As an architectural sculptor, Weinman's work can be found on the Wisconsin, Missouri, and Louisiana state capitol buildings. He became the sculptor of choice for the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White and designed sculpture for their Manhattan Municipal Building, Madison Square Presbyterian Church (demolished), Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, and Pennsylvania Railway Station (demolished), all in New York City. A photograph of one of his angels in a landfill in New Jersey is one of the saddest reminders of the destruction of Penn Station in 1966, but two of his eagles were retained as trophies outside the entrance to the new subterranean Penn Station. Elsewhere he created the dramatic frieze on the Elks National Veterans Memorial in Chicago and executed sculpture for the Post Office Department Building, the Jefferson Memorial, and the interior of the U.S. Supreme Court, all in Washington, D.C.
Weinman's non-architectural works include the Macomb and the Maybury monuments in Detroit. Another example of his non-architectural work is his Abraham Lincoln Statue (Kentucky) located in the center of Hodgenville, Kentucky.
Weinman was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949.
Weinman's works are mostly in a sort of lyrical neoclassical style. His figures typically are found wearing Greco-Roman clothing, but there is a fluidity found in his work that is a harbinger of the Art Deco style that was to follow him. His bronze statuette The Nude Golfer epitomizes this style. This work evokes the Greco-Roman style in its attention to anatomy and movement and the nude status of the athlete while the subject, a modern golfer, provides a modern twist in that it is a unique subject for the style at hand.
Read more about this topic: Adolph Alexander Weinman
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion—to rid God of His Maggots.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe.... The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.”
—Janet Malcolm (b. 1934)
“No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man’s front embraces the whole universe.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)