More things you didn't know the Friends have done #3

Black Snow by Harry Weinberger. 

A painting bought in 2002 for the Gallery's collection by FLAG members to mark the Golden Jubilee of HM Queen Elizabeth II

 To see this painting on Art UK's website click here.  (We are unable to reproduce because of copyright)

 

Harry Weinberger at work

There is something rather wonderful about knowing that a painting in our local art gallery is there because ordinary people decided it was worth having.

Black Snow, by Harry Weinberger (1924–2009), is one of those paintings.

The work was purchased for Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum by FLAG, the Friends of Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, to mark the Golden Jubilee of HM Queen Elizabeth II. So when we look at it today, we are not simply looking at a painting by an interesting local artist. We are looking at something that members and supporters of FLAG helped make possible for everyone to enjoy.

And it is a particularly intriguing painting.

Who was Harry Weinberger?

Harry Weinberger was born in Berlin in 1924 into a Jewish family. In 1939, as a teenager, he escaped Nazi persecution and came to Britain on the Kindertransport.

He went on to become a painter and an influential art teacher, eventually becoming head of painting at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, now Coventry University.

Weinberger became closely associated with Warwickshire. He lived in Leamington Spa from around 1969 until his death in 2009, continuing to paint here after retiring from teaching. His work is represented in a number of British public collections, including the Government Art Collection, National Museum Cardiff and the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry.

The Leamington collection contains several of his works, making Weinberger an important part of the town's artistic heritage.

He was, above all, a painter who loved colour. His influences included Van Gogh, Matisse and Munch, although his mature work developed into a highly individual style. Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher who was a close friend of Weinberger, admired his paintings for their intense colour and changing light.

So what is Black Snow?

The museum's collection record identifies the painting as oil on canvas, 770 × 1004 mm, and tells us something particularly useful: the subject is Hampstead Heath in winter.

Weinberger and his wife had a flat overlooking the Heath, and the museum records that this was the landscape he painted here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But why Black Snow?

Weinberger wasn't trying to paint snow as a camera might record it. His landscapes are constructed through strong areas of colour, shape and pattern. The snow becomes part of that visual structure rather than simply being a white covering over the landscape.

The next time you visit the gallery and see the picture, why not see if you can work out why it's called Black Snow? Perhaps it is snow but in shadow?

 

The gallery records do not explain the title, and there is no evidence that we have found in which Weinberger tells us exactly what he meant by it, so any explanation would be speculation.

And sometimes it is rather nice not to have the answer.

A painting with a local connection

Weinberger wasn't simply an artist who once visited Leamington. He lived here for around forty years.

His home was filled with objects that interested him as an artist, including masks, carvings and Russian icons, and these became sources of inspiration for his work.

His friendship with Iris Murdoch is another fascinating part of his story. Their correspondence, which spans many years, survives in an archive at Kingston University. Some of those letters had remained in Weinberger's Leamington home after his death.

So although Black Snow shows us a landscape many miles from Warwickshire, the artist who painted it has a very real connection with our own town.

Thank you, FLAG members!

Every membership, every subscription and every contribution to FLAG helps to build something which lasts beyond the individual donor.

Black Snow is a physical example of that.

Someone who joins FLAG may contribute a relatively small amount each year. Yet collectively those contributions helped bring an original painting by a significant local artist into public ownership.

It means that Weinberger's painting can be seen, studied, enjoyed and argued about by generations of people who never met him.