Henry Kreis

Henry Godfrey Kreis learned to cut stone before he learned anything else. Born in Essen, Germany, on July 27, 1899, he left school at fourteen to apprentice with a local tombstone carver. Four years of that, then three more in Munich studying sculpture under Joseph Wackerle — and the chisel became the only tool he ever really needed. Stone was his first language, and it stayed his language for life.

In 1922 he sailed for America, arriving nearly broke. So he did the one thing he knew: he set up gravestones, then carved stone in Buffalo, working his way back toward the work he wanted. He enrolled at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in Manhattan and fell in with Paul Manship — the sculptor whose sleek, stylized figures were remaking American art. (Manship's gilded Prometheus still hangs over the skating rink at Rockefeller Center; Kreis worked alongside him on it.) The two became lifelong friends, and Manship's clean, modern line runs through everything Kreis later touched.

He settled in Connecticut and taught at the Hartford Art School. When the Depression dried up private commissions, he joined the federal relief rolls — one of thousands of artists the government put to work through the Public Works of Art Project and the WPA. That detail matters more than it sounds: it is exactly how a stone carver from Essen ended up designing coins for the United States.

In the 1930s a wave of commemorative half dollars — special coins struck to mark a town's anniversary or a historic moment — handed sculptors a rare canvas: a real U.S. coin, in real silver, in real pockets. Kreis got three of them.

His first, the 1935 Connecticut Tercentenary half dollar, is his masterpiece. The obverse — the heads side — is just a tree: the Charter Oak, the hollow oak where, by legend, a colonist named Joseph Wadsworth hid Connecticut's royal charter in 1687 to keep the king's governor, Edmund Andros, from seizing it. No portrait, no allegory. A single gnarled tree carrying three centuries of a state's identity. It works because Kreis trusted the image to be enough — and the real oak was already part of the story, having stood until a storm finally toppled it in 1856.

The reverse carried an eagle, and that is where the trouble began. When the design went before the Commission of Fine Arts — the body that vets U.S. coin art — the sculptor Lee Lawrie complained that the eagle's head and feet looked "more like those of a hawk," and that the thirteen stars meant to stand for the original colonies were "so small as to be indistinguishable." The models were approved with changes anyway. There was a legal wrinkle, too: because the design came out of a federal relief project, the Commission technically wasn't supposed to be paying for it at all.

Then came the 1936 Bridgeport, Connecticut, Centennial half dollar — and Kreis's boldest swing. The obverse is a crisp profile of P. T. Barnum, the showman who had served as Bridgeport's mayor and is buried there, the only circus impresario ever to appear on U.S. money. But it was the reverse that started the fight. Kreis rendered the eagle in pure Art Deco: angular, streamlined, stripped to geometry. The numismatic historian Don Taxay later called it "the most modernistic seen on any coin," and Cornelius Vermeule praised "a thrusting eagle of conceptual, metallic style." The dealer B. Max Mehl was having none of it. The eagle, he wrote, was "the biggest joke… Not a feather appears on its tin-roof surface" — it looked like an airplane, and flipped over, like "a fine shark with two dorsal fins, an open mouth and a tongue." Mehl and the historians were describing the same thing: an artist dragging the national bird somewhere it had never been.

Kreis's third coin was quieter, and it carries a strange distinction. For the 1936 Arkansas–Robinson half dollar he supplied a new obverse portrait of Senator Joseph T. Robinson — only the fourth living person ever depicted on a U.S. coin. The reverse, an eagle before the Arkansas state flag, was an existing design by Edward E. Burr, carried over from the earlier Arkansas Centennial issue. So this time, for once, there was no eagle of Kreis's to argue about.

The half dollars are how collectors know him, but they were a footnote to a long sculptural career. Kreis cut the "Birth of a Nation" monument for Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, sculpted reliefs for the Bronx Post Office and the Brooklyn courthouse, and carved an eleven-foot figure of Honor for the North Africa American Cemetery at Carthage. In medals he was a master: the Connecticut Tercentenary medal (1935), a Society of Medalists issue, the Wise and Foolish Virgins (1947), and the George D. Widener Gold Medal of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1942). In 1948 the American Numismatic Society gave him its J. Sanford Saltus Award — the field's highest honor for medallic art — and in 1951 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.