1928-1991
"Speaking for
myself, the rightness between material, form,
content, expressive intention and the success
of their marriage is what constitutes beauty
in art. Moreover, they have to be in divine combination,
must radiate a "magic," a "soul," a "spirit" or
whatever you wish, to indicate the poetically
ineffable. It is the same quality which overwhelms
a sensitized observer, changes his or her life
and expands experience."
--E.Weinberg
Some artists, obsessed
by a personal vision, work a single vein for
all it's worth throughout a whole career, discovering
more than anyone had believed possible within
that limiting range of material... But there
is also another kind of artist, one who is
eager to enlarge his idiom so as to cover the
widest ranges of experience, to risk new styles
and the dangers of experiment, not for the
sake of easy adventurism or flashy novelty,
but by way of opening himself to large modes
of feeling or realms of experience that a mastered
but restricted vocabulary would not allow...And
if all artists may be divided into these two
camps, Elbert Weinberg is firmly in the second."[1]
 After a day of teaching at Boston University,
Elbert would often join me [Harold Tovish] and my wife for supper.
Later, we would sit around cursing the art world and all its
inhabitants, except us three, of course. Warmed up, Elbert would
regale us with appalling accounts of a romance gone sour, a wealthy
client who owed him money but would not pay up, of people who
seemed to exult in their ignorance, and other examples of human
foibles.
These incidents of "real life" struck him as totally
absurd and his stories were accompanied by howls of laughter--his
the loudest. After many such evenings it became reasonable
to speculate that that the only "reality" that counted
for Elbert was what happened in the studio. There, the
shaping of events was under his control, and he alone
bore the responsibility for the outcome.
He passionately believed in all
the old virtues of art: one could not
be skillful enough, nor know enough, nor be intellectually
or emotionally equal to the task of making a work
of art. . .
When he
died in 1991, his two studios in Hartford were
crammed with four hundred sculptures and nearly
a thousand drawings. Add to that the numerous
works he sold during his long association with
the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York. There
are the more than two dozen public and private
commissions he completed during his career,
among which are two of the finest Holocaust
Memorials anywhere. His productivity is truly
astonishing.Elbert did not develop a "signature style." He
was one of the breed that always asks, Is it
possible? and then plunges headlong in pursuit
of the answer. In the process he produced a
body of work that is notable for its variety
of content, style, and media. What holds his
work together is a Weinbergian exuberance,
inventiveness, and masterful execution.
--Harold Tovish [2]
Weinberg was widely recognized
among sculptors for his craftsmanship and his
predisposition to humanistic themes and forms.
"His talent was just leaking out of him all over the place. We
all felt he was the most talented sculptor that we knew," said
Charles Perry, a sculptor who met the artist at Yale University
and remembers seeing his first Weinberg work in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City as a student. "He was one of the
few sculptors who could, out of nowhere, take such a charged,
crazy idea, like a dog sitting on a chair
barking, and give it such an emotional charge that it actually
scared you," he said. "Very few works do that. They always remain
the stone or the material." [3]
1. Anthony Hecht, ARTS Magazine,
November 1982.
2. Professor Emeritus of Art, Boston University, Retrospective
Catalogue, September 1993.
3. Quoted in Hartford Courant, December, 1991.
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Prix
de Rome - 1951-53
Award for Achievement in the Arts - Yale University, 1959
Guggenheim Foundation Award - 1960
American Academy of Arts and Letters Sculpture Award, - 1968
National Academy of Design, Elizabeth H. Watrous Gold Medal for
Sculpture - 1989
National Sculpture Society for Lifetime Achievement in Sculpture,
Alex Ettl Grant - 1991
Boston Museum
of Fine Arts
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, DC
Jewish Museum, New York City
Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Phoenix Museum of Fine Art, Phoenix, AZ
Rhode Island School of Design Museum
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Yale University Museum, New Haven, CT
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