Elbert Weinberg (1928-1991), Bronze With Green Patina, 20th

Depicting a woman on her right toe with her left leg bent, arms spread, back curved. Very aerial ensemble, probably a dancer. Bronze not attached to its base, marble base. Beautiful patina. Very good general condition. Signature on the foot. Dimensions: H: 74 cm width: 61 cm depth: 33 cm .American artist. Marked by an accident that damaged the vision in his left eye when he was 4, he believes he always had “distorted depth perception, able to only see impressions from his right eye.” Very early in his adolescence, he had an approach to working in terracotta, and was passionate about three-dimensional creation. It was his mother who decided to give him sculpture lessons from a teacher: Henry Kreis, a German sculptor. Kreis taught at the Hartford Art School, and later at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and suggested that his student enroll there. They lied about his age and that's how he studied after school throughout his high school years. After graduating at age 23, Weinberg became the youngest winner of the Prix de Rome, allowing him to spend two years studying in Italy. There, he met poets, painters and musicians who reinforced his position as an artist. Returning to the United States, he accepted a scholarship to the Yale School of Design and assisted the master sculptor, José de Rivera, an abstract artist whose work was based on precise mathematical concepts. The director of the school, Josef Albers, the famous abstractionist of German origin, urged him to return to the United States to teach “the figure”. But this sort of pure abstraction did not suit him. His first commission “Ritual Figure” arrived when he was in Rome, by a visiting couple of the same nationality as him. This is an abstract sculpture, an unusual piece, made of wood of a man blowing an air instrument called the shofar and which had two arms growing from one shoulder. His sculpture appeared on the cover of Art In America magazine and it was after that that an administrator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned a sculpture from him for the museum in 1953. In 1959 he received a Guggenheim fellowship but preferred to return to Rome for the year, he will stay there for 11 years. Back in the United States, he taught at prestigious universities in the United States. Among the major public commissions carried out by Weinberg during this period were the procession for the Jewish Museum in New York, Jacob's Struggle with the Angel for Brandeis University, Justice for the University's Law School in Boston, and the Holocaust Memorial for Freedom Plaza in Wilmington, Delaware. As a figurative sculptor, Weinberg does not reject reality, but often radically departs from it to offer his own interpretation.