Anita Weschler

From Philosopedia

- In Anita's Studio

- Her favorite photo

Weschler, Anita (December 1903 – 12 March 2000)

Weschler was an American sculptor, painter, interior decorator, poet, and author. Born in New York, the daughter of J. Charles and Hulda Mayer Weschler, Anita Ruth Weschler studied in New York City at the Horace Mann School and studied art at the Parsons School of Design, the Art Students League under William Zorach, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Albert Laessle. In 1928 she married Herbert E. Solomon and most of her career was spent at Long Hill, their home/studio in Erwinna, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She also kept an apartment in New York and in the early 1980's, after selling Long Hill, she relocated there at 136 Waverly Place (Apartment 11-D), Greenwich Village, permanently.

One of her life-size works, The Humanist (1955), received national notice when a photograph in Look showed the statue being carried on the back of the diminutive sculptor, a feat made possible because it was the first such to be made out of lightweight, unbreakable glass fibers and plastic resins. It depicts a man of ambiguous race, two arms outstretched, one for giving, one for receiving. The Humanist (#6, 1956) described the work and Weschler’s artistic philosophy.

Her sculpture includes multi-figure groups, single figures, portraits, constructions, collages, and stone collages. She has used such media as bronze, aluminum, cast stone, stone, durastone (hydrocal), wood, plastic, plaster, terra cotta, and fiber glass. Her paintings include “organic abstractions” (synthetic glazes on panels), “translucencies” (plastic resins, abstractions backlighted in shadow box frames); and “linear abstractions” (works on paper). Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum in New York City; Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; Brandeis University; Wichita State Museum; and a variety of other United States as well as foreign collections, both private and public.

Her sculpture has been commissioned by the United States Treasury Department, and various portraits were commissioned by the U.S. Post Office in Elkin, North Carolina. Ten life-size portrait heads in bronze are in the Institute for Achievement of Human Potential, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has had forty one-person shows nationwide. Weschler has been a delegate to the US Committee of the International Association of Art, on the board of directors of the Sculptors’ Guild, and on the executive committee of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. She is the author of a book of poems, Nightshade, the recipient of many awards including the Audubon Artists Medal of Honor, and is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

Weschler, who since her youth had enjoyed reading Nietzsche and considered herself an atheist and a deist. In Nightshade (1931), the young bohemian Greenwich Villager wrote:

THE ABSOLUTE

Curled on iron bedstead,

Head tilted against the wall,

Pillow under the elbow,

Feet so chilly and small, Navajo blanket around them,

Patterned in black, red, and grey.

Thick dollar watch ticking loudly,

Hand on throat to allay

Pulse throbbing, uneven, bewildered.

Rag rug on rough floor;

Between wide windows twain,

Square table, pine topped, blue legged,

Where books and my verses have lain.

Under the mirror,

Sophisticate in this plain room,

Three perfume bottles are standing,

Shapely and sweet, on gloom

Of the varnished dresser.

All the scent they contain

Must vanish into darkness

In hush of the springtime lane.

Hand 'neath my breast to stifle the pain.

Never! Never, oh, never!

My, God! What a terrible word.

"God?" What does that mean when I say it? -

Something to bless me and care, -

My lover must be the great Lord then.

I want his cool hands in my hair. -

You blaspheme the maker to say that.

The Maker? deity? heaven?

Just synonyms, given to leaven

The bread of the common,

Who cannot see Beauty bare.

Beauty? All aid is lost then.

By whom can I swear?

For the loveliest thing I have ever

Known in noon or the night,

Is far as star from a comet,

Distant as torture from light.

Never, never, oh, never! -

Yet - in the flash of a thought,

Wind sweeping over the wild water,

All waves of being are caught

In a spray, mixed with that wind,

Of musical night or colorful day.

Blended and blown to the zenith

They are carried in vapor away.

She was an honorary member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. Her husband,Herbert E. Solomon, whom she married in December 1928 and who died in 1995 also was a freethinker.

Her “The Humanist,” a life-size statue, was loaned in 1995 by Warren Allen Smith to the Council for Secular Humanism, at the time of the dedication of the Center for Inquiry building in Amherst, New York. Visitors have said it is noteworthy for its texture and symbolism. In 2005, Smith donated the work to the Institute of Humanist Studies in Albany, New York. When the Institute closed, Smith appointed as the statue's caretakers Dr. David White and Dr. Timothy Madigan of the philosophy department at St. John Fisher College.

- Logo using Weschler's The Humanist

“A statue,” Weschler often declared, “should be touched,” an outlook frowned upon by gallery and museum guards. Shown a photo of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Herbert Hauptman speaking at the Center for Inquiry’s dedication ceremony while, just behind, someone had placed a hat atop The Humanist, Weschler laughed appreciatingly.

- Steve Allen and The Humanist

(See entry for Herbert Solomon.)

(See her obituary and an inventory of her papers at Syracuse University.)

{WAS, numerous conversations}