Alex Shagin

Alex Shagin was born near Leningrad on January 21, 1947 — Alexander George Shagin, the only child of George and Ekaterina. He trained at the Vera Mukhina School of Arts and Design, one of the Soviet Union's top art academies, finishing in the early 1970s. After a stint in the Soviet Army, he apprenticed at the Leningrad Mint.

His diploma project was a medal of Peter the Great. It impressed the authorities enough that they made him an artist of the mint, and by 1974 he was a leading designer there. The work was relentless: he was expected to finish a medal roughly every two months, and every design had to clear the state's Council of Art Medals before a die was ever cut. In those years his name went on Apollo–Soyuz, on Michelangelo, on the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Except, often, it didn't. Shagin never joined the Communist Party, and he paid for it — passed over for promotions, denied credit, his name removed outright from some of the Olympic medals he had sculpted. Then in 1978 he traveled to a medals exhibition in Poland and watched colleagues there choose their own subjects and answer to no committee. He went home and applied for an exit visa. He lost his post that day and waited more than a year, without income, before the visa came. He reached the United States in 1979 and has worked from Southern California ever since.

A medal is a small relief sculpture struck or cast in metal — relief being the design that stands up from the flat field. The hard part is compression: an artist has to fit a whole idea onto a disc you can hold in your palm and make it read at a glance. Shagin's gift was doing that with warmth and motion where the Soviet house style demanded stiffness.

Free at last to choose, he became one of America's most prolific medallists — by one ANA account, more than 1,200 medals across his career. The subjects ranged wide: George Orwell, Maimonides, Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, the Statue of Liberty centennial, the U.S. Constitution bicentennial, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, even Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. He worked for the U.S. Mint, the Israel and Singapore mints, the American Numismatic Association, and the White House under Ronald Reagan.

He also kept breaking the disc itself. Many Shagin pieces are cast rather than struck, and some abandon the flat round entirely: his 1985 medal for Reagan's second inauguration is a free-standing bronze sculpture that ripples like a flag caught in the wind, about four inches across. He patinated by hand — coloring the metal's surface himself — and signed and numbered the editions, so each of the 84 George Orwell medals, for instance, carries his own mark. A struck circulating coin is the opposite discipline: identical, anonymous, by the million. That contrast is the whole point of him.

His one brush with everyday U.S. coinage came in 2001. To help pay for the new Capitol Visitor Center, the Mint issued three commemoratives, and the reverse — the "tails" side — of the clad (copper-nickel) half dollar was credited as a composite of designs by Shagin and fellow medallist Marcel Jovine. The obverse was Dean McMullen's. The reverse is the kind of dense, meaning-packed arrangement the medal tradition prizes: 16 stars for the 16 states that existed in 1800, ringing inscriptions that honor the 6th Congress — its 32 senators and 106 representatives.