Heinrich Johann Dietrich "Heinz" Warneke (June 30, 1895 – August 16, 1983) was a German-born American sculptor, best remembered as an animalier, or sculptor of animals. His role in the direct carving movement "assured him a place in the annals of 20th-century American sculpture."
Warneke created a large number of works for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. These include the Last Supper Tympanum over the South Portal, the Saint Alban trumeau figure, and more than ninety minor works: sculpted column capitals, bosses, corbels, keystones, heads, flowers, etc. The Prodigal Son (1932–39), one of his most touching sculptures, is located in the Bishop's Garden.
Warneke's works are in the collections of American art museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Chrysler Museum of Art. His animal sculptures are in the National Zoo and the Philadelphia Zoo, and in sculpture gardens such as Brookgreen Gardens.
Warneke's most famous work is the Nittany Lion (1942) at Pennsylvania State University.
Life and career Warneke was born in Hagen bei Leeste, a small village near Bremen, Germany. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany, where his teachers included Karl Blossfeldt.McGlauflin, Alice Coe, editor, Who's Who in American Art: Volume II, 1938–1939, The American Federation of Arts, Inc., Washington D.C., 1937. p. 548Cunningham, Mary Mullen, Heinz Warneke (1895–1983): A Sculptor First and Last, University of Delaware Press, Newark, DE, 1994.
Warneke served in the German Army during World War I, but as a non-combatant—managing a cemetery in Bucharest, Romania from 1914 to 1918. He oversaw the mostly-Turkish prisoners of war who were brought in to dig graves and carve headstones.
In 1923, Warneke emigrated to the United States at New York City, and settled in St. Louis, Missouri.
United States Warneke had his first American exhibition at the St. Louis Public Library, in December 1923.Jackie R. Esposito and Steven L. Herb, The Nittany Lion: An Illustrated Tale (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) The works were small-scale animal figures, that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pronounced "extraordinary." According to a 1935 biographical sketch published by the U.S. Treasury Department: “His first work in America was a large stone eagle, 48 feet across the façade of the Masonic Temple in Fort Scott, Kansas.”“The Winners: Biographical Notes on the Sculptors and Painters who won the Competition for Statues and Murals to be placed in The Post Office Department,” Section of Painting and Sculpture, Public Works Branch, Procurement Division, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., Bulletin Number 6 (October–November 1935), p. 10.
From 1927 to 1930, Warneke lived in Paris, where he created social-realist, art-deco, and primitivist sculptures. He became a naturalized citizen after returning to the U.S. in 1930, and undertook multiple commissions for the Works Progress Administration.
Warneke operated his own art school in New York City, 1940-42.David W. Look, AIA, and Carole L. Perrault, The Interior Building: Its Architecture and It’s Art (U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Preservation Assistance Division, 1986.), pp. 121-22. After winning first prize at the Corcoran Gallery of Art's 1943 Artists Annual Show in Washington, D.C., he became head of sculpture at the Corcoran's school.“HEINZ WARNEKE, sculptor, and PEGGY BACON, etcher, painter and illustrator, have joined the faculty of the Corcoran School of Art in Washington for the 1942-43 term.” Pictures on Exhibit Magazine, (New York: Pictures Publishing Company), vol. 6, p. 22. From 1943 to 1968, he taught at both the Corcoran school and George Washington University, also in Washington, D.C.
Method In addition to carving in traditional media, such as wood, stone and ivory, Warneke carved in unusual media, such as iron, brass and aluminum, and even common brick."What the Critics Say of the New York Season," The Art Digest (Hopewell, NJ: The Art Digest, Inc.), vol. 2, no. 13 (April 1, 1928), p. 21. Photographs of his carved brick sculptures illustrate Richard F. Bach’s 1928 article, “Our Industrial Art: Manufacture and Mechano-facture,” in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.Washington, D.C.: Journal of The American Institute of Architects, vol. 16, no. 5 (May 1928), pp. 185-88. With all of the brass and iron models, Mr. Warneke explains, the method of working is the same. First a rough plaster cast is given to the foundry. When a crude sketch in brass is returned to the artist he begins to carve it, first simplifying the larger planes, and then, with tools finer than the rasp or large file used before, modeling the ultimate surface. It is actually a work of carving, for the first rough block is merely a larger, vaguer piece of metal, yet is better adapted to the speed of the work than a square chunk would be.Robert Tschaegle, “Brick and Brass, Wood and Stone: The Sculptural Art of Heinz Warneke”, The Mentor, vol. 16, no. 4 (May 1928), (Springfield, OH: The Crowell Publishing Company), p. 34. Warneke created works of unprecedented scale and weight, such as his life-sized African Elephant and Calf (1962) for the Philadelphia Zoo.Janet Ruth Falon, "Acres of Art in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park," The Washington Post, April 6, 1986.
Personal Warneke emigrated to the United States in 1923, and lived with friends of relatives in the large German-American community in St. Louis, Missouri. Edward T. Hall, one of Warneke's first benefactors, was an executive at Purina Mills (pet & livestock food) in St. Louis, and commissioned him to create animal sculptures as prizes for a company contest.
Warneke met and fell in love with Hall's wife, painter Jessie Gilroy Hall.Jessie Gilroy (Warneke) scrapbook, Bryn Mawr College Archives. She eventually divorced her husband, and married Warneke in March 1927. Twelve-year-old Edward T. Hall Jr. remained with his father, while five-year-old Priscilla Hall went with her mother.Priscilla Hall Waters Norton obituary, from Guilford Funeral Home. The Warnekes moved to Paris—"it is clear that leaving the country also helped put Saint Louis and the scandal of Jessie's divorce far behind them." They had returned to the United States and were living in New York City in 1930, when he became a naturalized American citizen.
During the 1930s, Warneke’s studio was at No. 12 Washington Mews, one street north of Washington Square Park.New York University, Greenwich Village Artists (self-guided walking tour), Grey Art Museum, (year). In 1931, the Warnekes purchased a farm in East Haddam, Connecticut, that the couple would own for the rest of their lives.Warneke House and Studio, from Creative Places. After giving up his New York City studio, Warneke converted the farm's barn into his studio, 1940.Creative Places: Arts & Letters in 20th Century Connecticut, Heinz Warneke He maintained a residence in Washington, D.C. during the decades that he taught there.Warneke listed his address as "1063 31st St., N.W., Wash., D.C.", in PAFA catalogues from 1946 to 1958. This was a 3-story rowhouse near Georgetown University, with the former stable converted into a studio. See Peter Hastings Falk, ed., The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Volume 3, 1914--1968 (Madison CT: Sound View Press, 1989), p. 475.
Following 55 years of marriage, Jessie Gilroy Warneke died in East Haddam, Connecticut in 1982. Warneke's final sculpture was their shared grave marker—"The image on the stone is of the two of them planting a tree together."Robert Hubbard and Kathleen Hubbard, Hidden History of Middlesex County, Connecticut (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2018), p. 125. Heinz Warneke died of a heart attack on August 16, 1983, in a retirement home in Madison, Connecticut."Heinz Warneke, Ex-Chief At Corcoran, Dies" The Washington Post, August 17, 1983.
Works Harlem River Houses
Public housing in New York City was segregated by race into the 1950s. Warneke created sculpture for the Harlem River Houses, part of an effort by the Federal Government to provide high-quality urban housing for working-class Blacks. Design critic for The New Yorker, Lewis Mumford, praised the results: “[T]he trees set about the ample open spaces in the fashion of the Luxembourg Garden; and the handsome sculpture by Heinz Warneke, the penguins round about the central wading pool and the wrestling bears on the east side of Seventh Avenue. The gracious austerity of the architecture magnifies the importance of each variation, and the sculpture is “functional” in a practical as well as an aesthetic sense, since the cast stone which composes it will be improved in finish by being handled and climbed over by children. ... Here in short, is the equipment for decent living that every modern neighborhood needs: sunlight, air, safety, play space, meeting space, and living space.Robert Wojtowicz, ed., Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), p. 211.
Warneke's two larger-than-life kneeling-figure sculptures were unexpectedly controversial. The male figure depicted a shirtless man with a sledgehammer; the female figure depicted a woman holding a baby and accompanied by a dog. The committee representing the future tenants "considered Warneke's portrayal of a black man as a laborer degrading." The statues' names also reinforced stereotypes, and were changed: Man, the Provider became Black Worker, and then Young Man.Barbara Melosh, ed., Gender and American History Since 1890 (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), List of Illustrations. Woman, the Mother and Housekeeper—which was captioned "Colored Concrete Statue Motherhood" in a 1941 photographLacy Schutz, "Affordable New York: Hudson River Houses," Museum of the City of New York Blog, November 10, 2015.—was changed to Negro Mother and Child, and then Mother and Child.Chapter 4. “When Public Housing Was White: William Lescaze and the Americanization of the International Style,” Charles L. Davis II, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style, (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), note 86.
Warneke's other cast-stone sculptures at the site were two examples of Tussling Bears, one in the West Courtyard and the other in the River Courtyard, and four examples of Penguin, which ringed the wading pool in the Central Courtyard. In a 1979 photograph accompanying the National Register of Historic Places nomination form, only one of the four Penguin sculptures was intact; another was headless, and the other two were missing or had been removed.NRHP Nomination Form: Harlem River Houses, photographs by Stephen L. Senigo, photo #3. In a 2024 restoration of the Central Courtyard, the wading pool was restored (without sculpture), and the Mother and Child kneeling figure was removed."Harlem River Houses Celebrates Central Fountain Restoration and New Playgrounds," The NYCHA Journal, Mat 21, 2024, from New York City Housing Authority.
Nittany Lion
The Nittany Lion has been Penn State's mascot since 1907. Thanks to advocacy in the student newspaper, momentum for a Nittany Lion statue was growing in the Fall of 1939. Fine Arts instructor Francis E. Hyslop wrote to three sculptors inquiring about their interest in the potential project. On April 22, 1940, the outgoing Class of 1940 voted to make the Nittany Lion sculpture their class gift, and $5,340 was raised for it.