George Klauba: the sailor who painted a coin's worth of memory

George Klauba was born in 1938 on Chicago's southwest side, the son of parents of Lithuanian descent. His father was a machinist who moonlighted as a stage magician. His mother, by Klauba's own account, did more for his eye than any classroom: she walked him through the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History, and those rooms set the course of his life.

In 1956, just shy of his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Navy. He served three years aboard the destroyer USS Kenneth D. Bailey, out of Newport, Rhode Island, as a gunner's mate and seaman with the Atlantic Fleet — two deployments to the Mediterranean with the Sixth Fleet, and a stretch off Cuba. The sea never left him. Decades later he was still painting it: Melville's Moby-Dick, sailors, tattoos, the constellations a watch-stander learns by heart.

Back ashore, he took a two-year commercial-art certificate at Chicago's American Academy of Art in 1961, then spent twenty-seven years as a graphic artist at the Chicago Sun-Times. As a fine artist he was entirely self-taught. That split — newspaper-deadline discipline by day, a strange and meticulous private imagination after hours — is exactly the combination that would one day put his hand on a coin.

Klauba is not a Mint engraver, and that is precisely what makes his one coin worth knowing about. For the 1991–1995 World War II 50th Anniversary commemorative, the U.S. Mint reached past its own staff and chose an outside design for the half dollar's obverse — the "heads" side. The winning drawing was Klauba's. For a painter whose whole career ran on warships and the sea, it was a near-perfect commission.

The obverse packs the war onto one small face of metal: three U.S. service personnel — soldier, sailor, and airman — set over a large "V" for victory, with a B-17 bomber and five stars riding above them. It reads as memory rather than reportage, recognizably the work of a painter and not a heraldic committee. Klauba supplied the design; a Mint sculptor-engraver then translated the drawing into the shallow relief — the height of the raised detail above the field — that a struck coin requires. Catalogs credit Thomas James Ferrell with modeling both the obverse and the reverse, the latter designed by Bill J. Leftwich. The coin was released on May 28, 1993, carrying the dual date 1991–1995 for the half-century from 1941 to 1945.

The match of artist to subject was no accident. Just three years earlier, in 1990, Klauba had won the Pauline Palmer Prize at The Chicago Show. And his war was never far from his canvas: in 2016 he mounted a show titled Nerves On Fire: Reflections On WWII at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. The Mint, in effect, found an artist who had spent decades rehearsing this exact subject.

Here is the detail that tells you who Klauba is. In 2006 he married Judith Burson Lloyd at the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford, Massachusetts — the seamen's chapel that appears in Moby-Dick, where Melville's Father Mapple climbs a ship's-prow pulpit to preach. Klauba painted Melville's whale obsessively; in 2009 the Rockford Art Museum hung Heart of the Sea, a retrospective of thirty-seven of his Moby-Dick paintings. For a man like that, getting married in the book's own chapel was less a wedding than a homecoming. The same sea that put him on a destroyer at seventeen, and onto a coin at fifty-five, ran straight through the rest of his life.