Harold F. Weston

Harold Weston (February 14, 1894 – April 10, 1972) was an American modernist painter, based for many years in the Adirondack Mountains, whose work moved from expressionism to realism to abstraction. He was collected by Duncan Phillips (now the Phillips Collection), widely exhibited in the 1920s and 1930s, and painted murals under the Treasury Relief Art Project for the General Services Administration. In later life he was known for his humanitarian food relief work during World War II and his arts advocacy that led to the passage of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965. Weston's most recent museum exhibition was at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, and his most recent gallery exhibition was at Gerald Peters Gallery in New York City.

Early life and education

Harold Weston was born February 14, 1894, in Merion, Pennsylvania, to Mary Hartshorne Weston, a pianist, and S. Burns Weston, the founder of the Ethical Culture Society in Philadelphia, who gave Weston an "integrity of purpose." Summers were spent by the family in the Adirondack Mountains in the company of the intellectual descendants of the American transcendentalists, for whom nature, aesthetics, and spirituality were fundamentally linked.

At the age of 15, Weston spent a year traveling in Europe and attending school in Switzerland and Germany, continuing to paint and draw in his sketchbooks while in Europe. After his return to the United States, Weston was stricken by polio in 1911, a chance occurrence that sealed his determination to be an artist. His left leg was paralyzed, and doctors said that he would never walk again. Through a regime of physical conditioning and the use of leg braces and a cane, Weston did learn how to walk and hike again, using his arms to hold onto trees as he went up and down mountains.

Weston entered Harvard University in 1912 and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in fine arts in 1916. He served as editor of the Harvard Lampoon, contributing a large number of cartoons and artworks to the magazine. In 1914, he studied under the American painter Hamilton Easter Field at the Summer School of Graphic Arts in Ogunquit, Maine.

Early career and World War I

Many people believed that the global crisis of World War I would lead to a spiritual regeneration, and Weston wanted to be in the midst of that, "to literally see the heart of humanity laid bare." Unable to enlist due to his paralysis, and before the U.S. entered the war, he volunteered with the YMCA from 1916 to 1919, serving as a liaison with the British Army in Baghdad in the Ottoman Empire, attending to the mental wellbeing of 400,000 troops. In addition to arranging lectures, cinema, concerts, and tournaments, he encouraged soldiers to draw and paint, and organized the Baghdad Art Club to exhibit and promote the soldiers' art. He was appointed Official Painter for the British Army in 1918.

Weston's years in the Middle East had a lasting impact on both his art and social activism. The colors and light of the desert, so unlike the rich greens and blues of the Adirondacks, deeply affected his palette. Weston also witnessed the horror of famine and disease while in the Middle East. He saw men, women, and children die of heat exhaustion and starvation. In the summer of 1917, he reported 400 people a day dying from heat that rose to 128 degrees F in the shade. Weston wrote about some of his experiences for the National Geographic Magazine in April 1921, which included his photographs that he color tinted.

In late 1919 Weston returned to the United States via a caravan east to India, and then by ship with a layover in Japan. For five months he contributed social work while living in an immigrant settlement house in New York City, took classes at the Art Students League of New York, explored the city's art galleries, and became acquainted with the latest in modern art reaching American shores.

Early Adirondack landscapes

In May 1920 Weston left the city for the Adirondack Mountains to take nature as his teacher. Weston wrote: "Not yet sure just what paint can and cannot express. Do not want at present more of theory and feel must work it out with this great and ever changing source of inspiration about me." With the help of local carpenters, he built a one-room, uninsulated log cabin studio near St. Huberts, New York. For the next two years he lived largely in isolation, exploring the mountains and lakes, creating plein-air sketches in oil and pencil on small pieces of cardboard. In the studio he painted canvases based on those sketches. When he wasn't painting, he chopped wood, cooked on a small wood stove, wrote letters and journal entries prolifically, and listened to classical records on his Victrola phonograph.

Weston's first solo exhibition was at the Montross Gallery in New York City in November 1922. He showed over one hundred oil sketches from Persia and the Adirondacks and 63 oil paintings, each of which rested in one of Weston's hand-carved and gilded frames. Critics heaped praise on his vibrant use of color and the unique American perspective he brought to his work. The Christian Science Monitor wrote that the show was the highlight of the season: "In his pictures [there is] something different, something stirring and magnificently bold, a proclamation of a bigger belief in beauty than is usually heard in the galleries."

Landscape Nudes

Weston met Faith Borton while giving a slide lecture about his experiences in Persia at Vassar College. He was impressed, and invited her along with his sister and friends to his cabin for a mid-winter party. Borton, raised Quaker in the suburbs of Philadelphia, was good-natured about the primitive experience in harsh winter weather. Hundreds of persuasive letters from Weston followed, until eight months later she relented. The couple was married on May 12, 1923.

For the first two and a half years of their marriage the Westons lived in the cabin studio—which now boasted indoor plumbing, a living room, and a bedroom—in the Adirondack Mountains. The period produced a significant change in Weston's work, that turned away from the landscape of nature toward the landscape of the human body.

原文较长，这里只摘了前面一部分，摘自英文维基百科「Harold Weston」（暂时没有中文条目，下面是英文原文），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。