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.

"[1] 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.

Through a regime of physical conditioning and the use of leg braces and a cane, Weston did learn how to walk and hike again, using his arms to hold onto trees as he went up and down mountains.

In 1914, he studied under the American painter Hamilton Easter Field at the Summer School of Graphic Arts in Ogunquit, Maine.

Many people believed that the global crisis of World War I would lead to a spiritual regeneration, and Weston wanted to be in the midst of that, "to literally see the heart of humanity laid bare.

"[2] Unable to enlist due to his paralysis, and before the U.S. entered the war, he volunteered with the YMCA from 1916 to 1919, serving as a liaison with the British Army in Baghdad in the Ottoman Empire, attending to the mental wellbeing of 400,000 troops.

For the next two years he lived largely in isolation, exploring the mountains and lakes, creating plein-air sketches in oil and pencil on small pieces of cardboard.

The Christian Science Monitor wrote that the show was the highlight of the season: "In his pictures [there is] something different, something stirring and magnificently bold, a proclamation of a bigger belief in beauty than is usually heard in the galleries.

The catalogue Wild Exuberance: Harold Weston’s Adirondack Art describes the paintings: "The nudes deviated from a long tradition of beauty that aspired to perfection.

These were no Botticelli or Titian Venuses, but cropped body parts painted as if with earth and flesh, whose primitive honesty complicated beauty with uncomfortably raw emotion and sex.

In August 1925, Harold Weston was hospitalized with a diseased kidney, which was removed, but he suffered a month of high fever before starting to pull out of it.

[7] The open fields and sunlight influenced Weston's palette, and his subjects broadened to include all manner of landscapes, figure painting, and still lifes in oil, watercolor, gouache, and etching.

Captivated by etching, which was better suited to their small Parisian apartments, Weston experimented with the techniques of hard and soft ground, burin, dry point, and aquatint with and without brush.

Weston exhibited his work in Paris, and also rolled-up canvases to ship back to New York City to be shown at the Montross Gallery.

For two-and-a-half years Weston worked 11 hours a day creating 840 square feet of 22 panels on canvas that were hung in the General Services Administration building in Washington, D.C., in 1938.

Then after Pearl Harbor, with memories of the starvation he had seen during the war in the Middle East, he moved to Washington, D.C., to advocate full-time for humanitarian food relief.

He outlined a plan that he called the Reconstruction Service Committee, for which he obtained the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, and which eventually evolved into the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

"[Weston] more than anyone else -- as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt has written me -- was responsible for the original conception and carrying through of UNRRA," wrote Lewis Mumford.

In 1953, the Westons started renting a small railroad flat over an Italian bakery in Greenwich Village for a phase of their life that took them to the center of the art world in New York City.

[12] Weston, "more than any other private individual played a key role in the improvement of our government's relation to the arts in our time," wrote Lloyd Goodrich.

[13] In the years after the completion of "Building the United Nations," Weston gradually transitioned into abstraction while maintaining a precisionist style.