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.
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.
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.
Warneke had his first American exhibition at the St. Louis Public Library, in December 1923. 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 [sic] eagle, 48 feet across the façade of the Masonic Temple in Fort Scott, Kansas.”
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. 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. From 1943 to 1968, he taught at both the Corcoran school and George Washington University, also in Washington, D.C.
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. 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.
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.
Warneke created works of unprecedented scale and weight, such as his life-sized African Elephant and Calf (1962) for the Philadelphia Zoo.
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. 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. 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. In 1931, the Warnekes purchased a farm in East Haddam, Connecticut, that the couple would own for the rest of their lives. After giving up his New York City studio, Warneke converted the farm's barn into his studio, c.1940. He maintained a residence in Washington, D.C. during the decades that he taught there.
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." Heinz Warneke died of a heart attack on August 16, 1983, in a retirement home in Madison, Connecticut.
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: