Still, from the day he picked up a crayon, he showed promise. "Copying Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on shirt cardboards - that was my specialty. My father had his shirts laundered, and they all came back on shirt cardboards. That was my favorite medium."

He traces the birth of his predilection for sculpture to his three-dimensional projects. He was always building soapbox derby racers, burglar alarms, submarines. But it was his youthful passion to create that won his parents over. When he was 14, he made a small clay relief and accidentally broke it while trying to cast it in plaster. It made him cry desperately, his mother recalls. If it's that important to him, she decided, he ought to have lessons.

So she called Henry Kreis, a German sculptor living in Essex, Connecticut. Kreis was teaching at the Hartford Art School then housed in the Wadsworth Atheneum, and he suggested that young El enroll. So he lied about his age and studied there at night throughout high school. It was a rigorous schedule, but he surmounted it to become valedictorian of his class at Weaver High in 1946...

After graduating, Weinberg enrolled at the art school full time and continued to study with Kreis, whom he idolized and to whom he credits his preference for lyrical, figurative work. He was equally devoted to Waldemar Raemisch, another German, with whom be studied upon transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design after two years. "He couldn't express himself in English," Weinberg says. "He was just a tremendously inspirational person-- his work and his love of art."

Under Raemisch he studied hard, but it was a labor of love. "When I was in art school, I had my own studio and boy, I worked." ...He worked at a car wash, painted flowers on furniture, taught arts and crafts at a boys' club. Meanwhile, he slaved away in his studio, an abandoned bathroom at the Volunteers of America, the home for derelicts in which he lived his first year. "I paid $2 a week, and I lived on crackers and jelly given by the Colonel, who ran the place. I lived with all the down-and-out guys, and the Colonel -- I'll never forget him -- he kept us alive."

Ultimately, all this diligence and deprivation paid off. After graduating at 23, Weinberg became the youngest recipient to ever have won the Prix de Rome, entitling him to two years of study in Italy. There, he met poets, painters, and musicians, and discovered that, for an artist, Europe is not just an ocean away but a world apart.

"You get up in the morning and you go out and greet your friends. In America, they say, 'How's business? How much did you make this month?' Whereas in Europe they ask you what you're making or what you're doing. They don't ask you how much you sold this year. Art is business here, and that's not what it's all about."

Upon returning home, he underwent not only cultural jet lag but future shock. He had accepted a scholarship at Yale School of Design, which involved assisting the master sculptor, José de Rivera, an abstract purist whose work was based on precise, mathematical concepts. The head of the school was Josef Albers, the famed German-born abstractionist best known for his series of paintings "Homage to the Square." It was Albers who had summoned Weinberg from Rome. "Come back and teach the figure," he had written. "Even though I don't believe in the figure, I think it should be taught in my school."

"Ritual Figure" made the cover of Art in America. Soon after, Weinberg got a knock on his door..."I hear you sold something to the Museum of Modern Art. I'm interested in you. "I just thought he was a great sculptor," said Grace Borgenicht [of the Borgenicht Gallery in New York City.] "I go by my eye and I guess it's pretty good, because I've stayed in business for 37 years."

Borgenicht remembers calling Joseph Hirshhorn, founder of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., on behalf of a struggling client. "I said, 'Joe, there's this terrific sculptor. He doesn't have any money to buy a piece of wood.'

In 1959 Weinberg landed a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant for a year of work. He decided to return to Rome for the year and ended up staying for 11. "It was a paradise for sculptors. They love artists. Whether you're good or not, they call you Maestro. 'Buon giorno, Maestro!' It's a wonderful feeling..."

Returning to America, he taught at Dartmouth and Boston University as visiting Professor of Sculpture, then back in Rome at Temple University, at Union College in New York, and finally, starting in 1983, as Professor of Sculpture at Boston University.

Among the major public commissions Weinberg completed during this time were: Procession for the Jewish Museum in New York, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel for Brandeis University, Justice for the Boston University School of Law, and the Holocaust Memorial for Freedom Plaza in Wilmington, Delaware.

In 1986, John Portman, an acclaimed architect known for introducing the atrium to contemporary hotel design, turned to Weinberg to humanize the 18-story lobby of his Portman Hotel San Francisco [now Pan Pacific Hotel.]

"Elbert has a unique way of giving life to form, where the piece carries with it an aura that's very special," Portman said. He's a very warm person, and I think it comes out in his sculpture." Weinberg's exuberant Joie de Danse not only illustrates his skill in gearing a piece to complement a specific environment, Portman believes. It is also an exceptional, compelling work. "It just grabs you.' he says. "Just to observe people looking at it and see the response on their faces tells the whole thing ... He's one of the best."

Weinberg's early subjects draw heavily on mythological and Biblical themes, but there are also more contemporary, earthbound motifs, such as his mad dog series. "...People might say, 'Oh my God, what a thing to try to do in sculpture!'" notes Weinberg. 'An idea like that.'" He is the first to acknowledge that these fierce beasts are unsettling, but bristles at a suggestion that they may not be what people want in their living rooms: "This is not art for all," he thunders. "What does this have to do with the average person? Most people don't understand art," he declares, "any more than they understand Greek. "Art is a language, like any other language. You have to be exposed to it, you have to learn it. The average person, without that training, likes things that look like reality." He poses one hand before him. "If you saw my hand in wood or stone, the average person would say 'fantastic!' And it would be a piece of trash!"

As a figurative sculptor, Weinberg doesn't reject reality, but often departs from it radically to offer his own interpretation.