In college I wrote for the daily college student newspaper — The Dartmouth — from early in my freshman year through my senior year. I interviewed visiting lecturers, reviewed movies and books, and covered arts-related events, usually working late in the paper’s office on a beat-up typewriter to scratch out copy to a midnight deadline. Copy would be taken to the paper’s printing plant in a nearby town that must have been Lebanon or West Lebanon.
In 1972 I interviewed artist-in-residence Elbert Weinberg. I hadn’t thought about the interview for a long time. After typing up my Dartmouth account of my dinner with Bill (Buckley, that is), found in an old scrapbook, it came back to me.
Weinberg was a sculptor. I interviewed him in the gallery that was exhibiting his work on campus in the Hopkins Center for the Arts. All my dreams of Dartmouth — and there are many, usually expressing anxiety about not having studied for a final exam or having avoided attending class for the duration of the quarter — revolve one way or another around the Hop.
I know nothing about sculpture. However, I was struck by the character and beauty of Weinberg’s work on display at the time. Some of it looked to me like a sculptural expression of Picasso’s vision. That was my level of appreciation. He was easy to talk to. I liked him. He couldn’t have been nicer.
Weinberg died of myelofibrosis in 1991 at the age of 63. There is now a site dedicated to him. The home page of Weinberg’s site is accessible here. The home page includes a 23-minute video on his career. The site’s posted biography includes quotes of the kind he gave me in the interview. The site also includes photographs of his sculptural work in different subjects.
The biography quotes Grace Borgenicht commenting on a critical moment in his career:
“I just thought he was a great sculptor,” said Grace Borgenicht [of the Borgenicht Gallery in New York City]. “I go by my eye and I guess it’s pretty good, because I’ve stayed in business for 37 years.”
Borgenicht remembers calling Joseph Hirshhorn, founder of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., on behalf of a struggling client. “I said, ‘Joe, there’s this terrific sculptor. He doesn’t have any money to buy a piece of wood.’ So Joe gave me the money to give him to buy the wood, and then he did a beautiful woodcarving which they bought and put in the museum.”
Grace Borgenicht was the aunt of my friend and classmate Leon Black. Leon took me to her gallery and introduced me to her as we drove to his parents’ Manhattan apartment in the spring of 1972. Leon had invited me to join his family for Passover. Coincidentally, researching this post, I learned that Weinberg had a long association with her gallery, which survived from 1951 to 1995.
In a review of a 1975 exhibition of Weinberg’s work at the Borgenicht Gallery, the late, great art critic Hilton Kramer wrote in the New York Times:
Mr. Weinberg, an American sculptor resident in Rome, is something of a virtuoso in his command of high rhetoric, violent gesture and complex composition. Like other contemporary sculptors with an appetite for the grand statement, he is obliged to invent an iconography of his own. This one consists largely of animal imagery intended, apparently, as a commentary on human affairs. Carcasses are fragmented and regrouped: The musculature of ferocious dogs, for example, is reshaped into symbols of violence and the irrational. Large and sometimes comic emotions are attempted, but what the work mainly conveys is a terrific technical competence in search of an august occasion.
In any event, I wrote up my interview with Weinberg days early. It was the only story I ever turned in ahead of deadline. When it was published, however, every sentence was riddled with typos. It must have been typeset without anyone ever proofing it because it wasn’t to be published the next day.
I actually remember the last line of my story as published. It ended with a quote conveying Weinberg’s artistic credo with the comment: “I fuwwa that’s what I’m trying to do.”
I was embarrassed and disgusted. When I saw Weinberg later that day, he tactfully asked me what had happened. I didn’t know any more than he did. Looking back, I should have asked the editor to have it corrected and run it again, but the thought didn’t even occur to me. I’m pretty sure my mom did not salt that one away for me in a scrapbook somewhere.
