Harold Weston was an American artist who represented modernism, realism, and abstractionism. Many of his landscapes, landscape nudes, still-lifes, and murals were inspired by his travels. He painted in Persia, the Adirondack mountains, French Pyrenees, Greenwich Village, and the Isle of Rhodes.
Background
Harold Weston was born on February 14, 1894, in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, United States. He was a son of Samuel Burns Weston and Mary Weston (maiden name Hartshorne).
Weston’s twin brother, Edward, didn’t survive his infancy and died when he was only six months. Harold had also a sister named Esther and a brother Charles.
Education
At the age of fifteen, Harold Weston traveled around Europe and did a lot of sketches. During this time, he attended schools in Switzerland and Germany.
Weston entered Harvard University in 1912. In a couple of years, the young man developed his painting skills at the Summer School of Graphic Arts in Ogunquit, Maine under the American painter Hamilton Easter Field. Weston obtained his degree in Fine Arts magna cum laude in 1916.
In his twenties Harold Weston volunteered as a member of the British Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). From 1916 to 1920, he served as a hospitality liaison with the British Army in Baghdad in the Ottoman Empire. He pushed soldiers to draw in their free time, and to promote their art, he established the Baghdad Art Club in 1917. The experience Weston had in the Middle East later influenced both his art and humanitarian work.
The painter left the British YMCA and came back to the United States in 1920. He had lived in New York City for four months exploring the tendencies in modern art via the city's art galleries. Then, the painter relocated to the Adirondack Mountains where with the help of a local carpenter he constructed a one-room log cabin not far from St. Huberts, New York.
While there, he explored the local nature capturing every change in its state and then used it on his sketches in oils and pencil on cardboard, and ‘serial picture songs’ canvas he made in the studio. About one hundred of these oil sketches and 63 oil paintings on canvas were shown at his debut solo exhibition at the modernist Montross Gallery in New York City in November 1922. The show received good reviews from critics.
The marriage with Faith Borton a year later pushed Harold Weston to shift from natural landscapes to so-called ‘landscape nudes’ with his spouse as a model.
Looking for rehabilitation after removal of a diseased kidney in August 1925, Weston and his wife moved to the French Pyrenees. The couple traveled around the country and enlarged their artistic circle meeting local painters and artists. Weston‘s works of the period adopted Europe’s light and color. The paintings he created during four years stint in France were exhibited at Latin Quarter gallery in Paris and at the Montross Gallery in New York City. In addition to canvases, Weston learned etching technique and produced his own series of seven etchings called ‘The Love Series’.
On his return to the United States in 1930, Harold Weston and his spouse lived for some time in Greenwich Village before settling in the Adirondack Mountains. Surrounded by picturesque nature and his small family, the painter concentrated more on depicting the every-day life. With his still-lifes regularly demonstrated across the United States, at such galleries as the Phillips Memorial Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, he quickly earned the status of a major American artist of 1930s.
From 1936 to 1938, the time of the Great Depression, Weston worked on murals commissioned by the Treasury Relief Art Project for the lobby of the General Services Administration building in Washington, D.C. The artist created twenty-two panels depicting dynamic moments in the federal construction process.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, preoccupied with the political situation in Europe, Harold Weston abandoned his painting activity in 1942 in favor of social work.
He returned to painting seven years later and undertook the decoration of the United Nations headquarters under construction in New York City. He spent three years working on the project developing his skills in hyper-realistic style.
In 1954, the Westons family settled down in Greenwich Village. The same year, the artist took part in the foundation of the National Council on Arts and Government which he had presided till 1970. Another administrative post was the presidency at the United States Committee of the International Association of Arts from 1961 to 1967.
Although he devoted a lot of time to administrative work, he continued to paint throughout the 1960s trying his hand in abstraction. In 1968, he initiated his last significant project called ‘Stone Series’ he had worked on for four years.
In 1971, Harold Weston issued ‘Freedom in the Wilds: A Saga of the Adirondacks’.
Harold Weston was a political and social activist during World War II. It was wartime famine that he had saw during his stint in Persia that pushed him to get involved in the sphere of humanitarian food relief.
In 1943, he established Food for Freedom organization aimed to advocate for food aid for refugees in Europe and Asia on behalf of more than 60 million Americans. Soon, Weston gained the status of an expert on food and farm policy of the United States. Eleanor Roosevelt named him the motivator of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Membership
Harold Weston was an honorary member of the Society of American Graphic Artists, the National Society of American Mural Painters, the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, the United States Institute of Theatre Technology, and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
In 1963, he was elected a Life Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Harold Weston suffered from poliomyelitis in 1911 which made his left leg paralyzed. Against the predictions of doctors that he would never walk again, as a man of strong will the artist surpassed the malady and learned not only how to walk but continued hiking, clinging to trees, and climbing mountains.
In 1925, Weston had a kidney infection and doctors removed one of his kidneys.
Interests
Sport & Clubs
hiking, rowing, climbing
Connections
Harold Weston met his future wife, the Quaker girl Faith Borton, in 1922. He was impressed by her intelligence and sensitivity. Harold and Faith married the following year in a Quaker meeting house on May 12.
Faith became Weston’s lifelong partner and muse. She inspired her husband to create his famous ‘landscape nudes’.
Weston and Borton had three children. Their names were Barbara, Bruce, and Haroldine.