Harold 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