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:
“Good work is not accomplished in haste.”
—Chinese proverb.
“The real risks for any artist are taken ... in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it—when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless.... They have put into practise the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)