-Frederick W. Sleight, Director Palms Springs Dessert Museum

-Frederick W. Sleight, Director Palms Springs Dessert Museum

-Frederick W. Sleight, Director Palms Springs Dessert Museum

by Helen Wilson

Michelangelo, the great sculptor, standing before a gleaming block of white marble was known to say, “Within you lies ugliness and beauty; what comes out depends on me.”

And so it has been down through the ages with cultural arts The molded or chiseled beauty created by a sculptor’s hands; nature’s wonders which come alive under the artist’s brush; or the words of beauty and wisdom that flow from an author’s pen.

Wasn’t it Matthew Arnold who said that culture is a searching for sweetness and light and the passion for making both prevail?

Albert Wein is this type of artist.  In a modern world, where specialization is the keyword, Wein transcends such skepticisms as “single skills” in man.  He combines a successful creativeness in boht painting and sculpturing.  Few painters have become masters at sculpture and still fewer sculptors have become painters of note.

Albert Wein created some of the most heroic and sensual sculptures you’ve probably never seen.

But if you saw his frankly erotic nude “Phryne Before the Judges” or the monumental granite goliath “Unity” spanning the Columbia River, you’d never forget his name.

In the first retrospective of his work, “Albert Wein: American Modernist,” more than 50 of his classic sculptures, paintings and medals are now displayed at the Boston Athenaeum.

The exhibit also showcases 13 of Wein’s vivid, often haunting Modernist paintings that reveal his craft and distinctive response to different 20th century movements.

Visitors will discover a singular artist who glorified the human figure in bold, beautiful sculptures that combined classical forms with 20th century dynamism. They will also see a multitalented artist whose painting styles ranged from Cubist to abstract and prophetically symbolic.

Now mostly ignored or forgotten, Wein’s work in this exhibit should reintroduce an American original who deserves to be reassessed as a first-rate sculptor who captured the energy and ideas of his times without compromise or capitulating to public sentiment.

Displayed in the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery, the show runs through Nov. 29.

The stately Athenaeum, rising above Beacon Hill, provides the perfect setting for Wein’s art.

The sculptures, paintings and medals seem at home in the nation’s largest subscription library, which claims as members national luminaries including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Herman Melville.

Born in 1915, Wein was a prodigy who studied several artistic disciplines to become a nationally recognized sculptor whose fame was eclipsed after his death in 1991 by the rise of abstract and conceptual art.

The majestic sculptures on display seem as if they belong in the Athens of Pericles or the Coliseum of Rome.

As if forged in the Earth’s molten guts, Wein’s muscular granite “Adam” gazes skyward as though to challenge the heavens. His “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” gallop atop a jagged bronze mushroom cloud like wraiths from hell.

Ecstatically arching her back, the bronze “Eve With Snake” reaches up to cup the serpent’s jaws like a mother comforting a child.

Welcome to Wein’s vanishing world.

In an age dominated by self-referential conceptual and abstract art, Wein emerges as a sculptor whose bold works express the grand impulses and dynamic energy of a long-gone Heroic Age.

The exhibit was organized by David Dearinger, the Athenaeum’s curator of painting and sculpture, who knew the late sculptor and remains an expert on his work.

Following the artist’s death, his widow, Deyna Wein, called Dearinger and asked, “How do we keep his flame alive?” This exhibit provides a major step.

Dearinger praised Wein for creating his signature look by fusing classic and modernist elements that made his sculptures both timeless and contemporary.

He hopes the exhibit prompts both a critical re-evaluation and popular interest in Wein and artists of his times who revered the human figure. He said critics and the art market are just “rediscovering those American sculptors who came of age during the 1930s and ’40s.”

“Many of these men and women were trained in the traditional aesthetics of Classicism. They initially worked in the Art Deco movement, gained experience through WPA (Work Projects Administration) projects and ultimately helped bring Modernism to America. Albert Wein was one of those artists and it’s exciting for us to collaborate with the artist’s estate in presenting this, the first major exhibition of his work,” he said.

Dearinger believes Wein’s style resulted from a combination of influences including an early interest in art and the classical nude, a passion for music and theater inherited from his mother, and study at the National Academy of Design in New York and Beaux-Arts Institute of Fine Arts in Manhattan, which employed a European curriculum focused on the training of architects.

Wein’s subjects ranged from mythological and religious figures, larger-than-life humans, sculpted tributes to musicians such as Pablo Casals and even Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan atop the mound.

Albert Wein at Boston Anthenaeum
While Wein’s sculptures are often described as “classical,” many embody a primitive element of exaggerated features and musculature that conveys a seeming superhuman power.

Rather than mimic Classical examples, Dearinger emphasized that Wein “idealized” his figures to convey their beauty or moral purpose. And he observed that Wein imbued his figures with the energy and grace he also admired in classical music and dance.

In early sculptures like “Harvest” and “Man With Plow,” Wein’s powerful male figures never display the stolidity of later Soviet-era statuary but retain their athletic grace.

As organized by Dearinger, the exhibit flushes out the breadth of Wein’s achievement from his sculpture to his detailed medals, from prophetic paintings like his “Atom Bomb” series to designing sets for television including “The Ernie Kovacs Show.”

While many might regard the 30-foot-tall relief of the figure “Unity” he designed for the Libby Dam in Montana as his crowning achievement, several works of a more intimate scale reveal Wein’s visionary breadth.

His 14-inch bronze “Sermon On The Mount” rises from a small pedestal as if preparing for his Ascension. Though made to serve as a logo for a television show, Wein’s angular 1959 “Don Quixote” atop his beloved steed “Rocinante” conveys the farcical idealism of the Spanish knight errant.

And perhaps more than any single work, his powerful “Four Horseman,” finished five years before his death, combines classical and abstract elements to convey Wein’s deep fears about the atomic arms race.

While this is the first major retrospective of Wein’s work, it should not be the last but, rather, open the door for an undervalued treasure.

THE ESSENTIALS:

The Boston Athenaeum is located at 10-1/2 Beacon St., Boston, just a short walk from the State House.

Admission to the gallery is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are: Monday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Tuesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The exhibit is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated hardcover catalog, “Albert Wein: American Modernist,” written by David Dearinger. It costs $55. For more information call 617-227-0270 or visit www.bostonathenaeum.org.

Four horsemen, wretched and desiccated, cloaked and flying blindly, gallop out of the eye of a bronze cylinder in the shape of a mushroom cloud. They represent the biblical horsemen of the Apocalypse—Conquest, War, Famine and Death—that sculptor Albert Wein thought nuclear weapons would unleash on the earth.

Wein, though not a household name, was a highly decorated sculptor. His career began in the ’30s and ended with his death in 1991. “He was one of that generation that has just now been rediscovered,” David Dearinger, curator and art historian, says. “The group that kept ‘the figure’ alive in art.”

The first major retrospective of Wein’s work is showing in Boston. Curated by Dearinger, the show is timed to coincide with the publication of the first major monograph of Wein’s life and work.

The collection begins with a piece Wein crafted when he was 19. “Idealized Head” is a granite sculpture that, while crude in design, exhibits the style that Wein used throughout his life. The head’s features are simplified and angular but its basic shape is not abstracted. Over time, Wein would be known for a classical appreciation of the human figure, informed by his appreciation for abstraction. Wein himself once said that his goal was “to modernize and stylize the classical tradition.”

As he was coming into his own as an artist, the country was in the throes of the Great Depression, and Wein, like many artists, worked for the federal works project, the Works Projects Administration. Much of his work from this WPA period depicts what were considered “American themes” by the WPA laborers and working-class families. Wein’s figures look like they were lifted from a Diego Rivera mural and given an extra dimension. The strength of their hands, forearms and chests are exaggeratedly strong and prominent, and their strength and pose seemingly extol the virtue of labor.

The formative years of Wein’s life were lived between the great wars, and though he was too young to fight in World War I and too old to fight in World War II, spending his life in the shadow of conflict affected him deeply. He became a committed pacifist and some of the most powerful work in the show reflects his contempt for the human cost of war.

In addition to the four horsemen, Wein painted a series of watercolors for display in the Jewish Museum in New York. The two examples displayed at the retrospective hold the greatest currency in the show, given our ongoing twin wars. In “Two Figures” the outlines of a pair of human figures stand before a wrecked wall and a crumbling wrought iron gate. One has a hand outstretched, palm toward the sky, the other hunkers beneath the first, nearly unidentifiable as a human being. They are standing on a desolate landscape, what was a city.

BOSTON.- The Boston Athenæum presents “Albert Wein: American Modernist,” the first museum retrospective of the sculptor’s work. The exhibition opens on Sept. 17 and runs through Nov. 29, 2008, in The Boston Athenæum’s Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery.

Sculptor Albert Wein (1915-1991) had both a keen interest in the human figure and an awareness of and appreciation for modernist concepts, specifically abstraction. Today, scholars are taking a closer look at artists such as Wein, who sought to balance the legacies of the past with the excitement of the future. This exhibition will be the first museum retrospective of Wein’s work and is being held on the occasion of the publication of the first major monograph on the artist’s life and work.

According to exhibition curator and art historian David Dearinger, “Scholarship and the market are now in the process of rediscovering those American sculptors who came of age during the 1930s and ’40s. Many of these men and women were trained in the traditional aesthetics of Classicism – they initially worked in the Art Deco movement, gained experience through WPA projects, and ultimately helped bring Modernism to America. Albert Wein was one of these artists, and it is exciting for us to collaborate with the artist’s estate in presenting this, the first major exhibition of Wein’s work.”

Albert Wein was the only son of artist Elsa Wein. Her early influence had a profound effect on the creative course that he would take. When Albert was 12, Elsa enrolled herself and her son in classes at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts, a major art school that adhered to the academic traditions of Classicism that would continue to have an impact on Wein’s work throughout his career. He once said that the main thrust of his work was “to modernize and stylize the classical tradition.”

Wein also matriculated at the influential Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. In the 1930s, he worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and in 1946 won the Prix de Rome, a distinguished award that allowed him to study at Rome’s American Academy. In Europe, Wein was inspired by the classical art of Italy, and the work of his contemporaries, both European and American.

In 1955 Wein moved to California where — besides creating sculpture for numerous churches, synagogues, and private collectors — he drew upon his experience of New York theater. He designed sets for television productions and was art director for the Ernie Kovacs Show. He experimented with a wide range of media and explored figurative abstraction in both his sculpture and painting.

In the late 1950s and 60s, Wein followed the trend toward abstraction but returned to figurative work in the 1970s. At that time he received the commission for the major commemorative sculpture for the new Libby Dam in Montana (1973), the largest granite relief in the United States. The commission prompted Wein to return to the East Coast, where his family eventually settled in Westchester County, New York.

During his long career, Wein received most major American awards given for sculpture. In 1989 he was awarded a residency fellowship to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. In late 1990 he completed a major commemorative medal for Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina. It proved to be his last major work. Albert Wein died of cancer in 1991.