Western & Contemporary Native American Art

Provenance:

Acquired directly from the artist by Dr. Edgar A. Lawrence, MD

Thence by descent, private collection of granddaughter 

Illustrated:

Patricia Broder, Bronzes of the American West, New York, 1973, pp. 197-198.

Adolph Alexander Weinman emigrated with his widowed mother to the United States from Germany when he was ten years old. At fifteen, having shown artistic promise, Weinman was apprenticed to Frederick Kaldenberg, an eminent carver of wood, ivory, and meerschaum pipes. In her brief biography of Weinman in Bronzes of the American West, Patricia Janis Broder writes: “It was perhaps Weinman’s early training in so delicate a medium as ivory that gave him such precision in his later work.” (p. 192). After studying at Cooper Union and the Art Students’ League of New York, under Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Weinman served as assistant to Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, and others, including Olin Levi Warner, whose interest in Native Americans fired Weinman’s own imagination. In 1904, Weinman opened his own studio and gained acclaim for a large sculptural group exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Two years earlier, while amassing reference for the St. Louis commission, Weinman attended Colonel Cummings’s “Wild West Show,” at New York’s Madison Square Garden. There, he met and made studies of several Sioux Natives, including Black Bird, a Sioux chief, who would inspire what is perhaps Weinman’s greatest bronze and most enduring image, Chief Black Bird, Ogalalla Sioux. Weinman sought to portray Native Americans as individuals, as opposed to “types,” and the artist’s sensitivity is readily seen in this portrait, which deftly juxtaposes the topography of experience against the wisdom of a lifetime in the lines around the eyes and mouth and in the clarity of the eyes themselves. Contrast this with the lightness of the headdress—a weightlessness that makes it seem as though a breeze is ruffling the feathers—a feat difficult to achieve in bronze. Weinman’s classical training and precision can also be found in his design for one of our most elegant coins, the “Walking Liberty” half dollar, issued by the U.S. Mint from 1916-1947.

- James D. Balestrieri