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Harold Weston
American, 1894-1972
Harold Weston was born February 14, 1894 in Merion, Pennsylvania, to S. Burns and Mary Hartshorne Weston. A twin brother, Edward, died at the age of six months. The family was well-off financially. At the age of 15, Harold spent a year traveling in Europe and attending school in Switzerland and Germany. It was in Europe that Harold Weston began to draw.
After his return to the United States in 1910, Harold Weston was stricken by polio. His left leg was paralyzed. But Weston refused to take the advice of doctors who declared that he would never walk again. Through a regime of physical conditioning and the use of leg braces and a cane, Weston learned how to walk (albeit with a pronounced limp). He began to hike, clinging to trees as he went up and down hill.
Weston entered Harvard University in 1912 and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Fine Arts in 1916. Weston continued to hone his graphic art skills, serving as editor of the Harvard Lampoon and contributing a large number of original 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.
Unable to enlist due to his paralyzed leg and with World War I looming, Weston volunteered with the YMCA, serving as a hospitality liaison with the British Army in Baghdad in the Ottoman Empire. He encouraged soldiers to draw and paint to pass the time, and organized Baghdad Art Club in 1917 as a means of exhibiting and promoting their art. Because of this work, he was appointed Official Painter for the British Army in 1918.
The 1930s led Weston away from art. The national crisis brought about by the Great Depression brought out Weston's social and political consciousness. When in 1936 the Treasury Relief Art Project asked him to paint murals for the General Services Administration building in Washington, D.C.
The advent of World War II led Weston to abandon painting entirely in 1942 in favor of political work. Disturbed by memories of the starvation he had seen in the Middle East, he lobbied full-time for humanitarian food relief. In 1943, he founded Food for Freedom, and built a coalition of civic, religious, labor and farm organizations representing more than 60 million Americans which advocated for food aid for refugees in Europe and Asia. He became an expert on food policy and the politics of farm policy in the U.S. Weston conceived of an international food relief agency which would provide a permanent mechanism for supplying food to refugees around the globe. He personally lobbied Eleanor Roosevelt for the idea; she credited him as the impetus behind the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Weston seized upon the idea of painting the United Nations headquarters, then under construction in New York City. He worked on the painting for three years, further refining his hyper-realistic style. But he was still politically active. That same year, Weston helped found the National Council on Arts and Government, an artists' group which lobbied for government support for the arts.
Known more for his political work than his painting by his mid-60s, Weston sought to return to his first artistic love. He abandoned realism in favor of abstraction.
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