Jacques Schnier

Jacques Schnier came to coins by the long way around. He was born in Constanța, Romania, on December 25, 1898, and crossed the ocean as a small child in 1903. The family settled in San Francisco, and that city would shape everything he made.

He chose a practical path first. Schnier earned an engineering degree from Stanford in 1920, then sailed for Hawaii to run the machinery for the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Company on Kauai. It was steady, sensible work for a young immigrant. It also wasn't what he wanted.

Around 1926 he came back to the Bay Area and walked away from engineering for good. By 1927 he was committed to sculpture — studying at the California School of Fine Arts, taking classes at Berkeley, the engineer's eye for structure quietly carrying over into how he built a figure. In 1936, the year of his famous coin, the University of California, Berkeley made him a professor of sculpture. He held that post for thirty years, until 1966, and founded the department's sculpture program along the way.

In the autumn of 1936, San Francisco was about to throw a party. The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge — at the time among the longest bridges on earth — opened to traffic on November 12, and the city wanted a commemorative half dollar to mark it. The bridge-celebration committee chose Schnier, a local sculptor with a modern reputation, to design it.

His instinct was modern, not classical. On the reverse — the "tails" side — he laid the new bridge across the coin as if you were standing on the San Francisco shore: the Ferry Building in the foreground, Yerba Buena Island mid-bay, the Berkeley hills beyond, a ferry and an ocean liner on the water. It reads like a postcard of the moment. On the obverse — the "heads" side — he set a California grizzly, the animal on the state flag, in bold relief. It is one of the most recognizable creatures on any US coin.

The grizzly came with an argument attached. Critics claimed the model was Monarch II, a bear who had lived 26 years in a cage in Golden Gate Park — hardly, they sniffed, a fit emblem of Liberty. The numismatic historian Q. David Bowers countered that the bear was a composite of several animals Schnier had studied at the San Francisco and Oakland zoos. Both stories survive; the second is the better-sourced one.

Then came the federal review. The Commission of Fine Arts — the body that vetted US coin designs — looked at the work on September 15, 1936. The sculptor Lee Lawrie, the commission's own artist-member, asked Schnier to enlarge the lettering. Chairman Charles Moore noted that the bear's nose "was unlike that of a grizzly" and sent reference photos to fix it. The mottoes caused their own fuss: to settle a placement dispute, E PLURIBUS UNUM was dropped from the design entirely and IN GOD WE TRUST moved to the left of the bear. Schnier reworked it all, the Medallic Art Company of New York reduced his plaster models to coin-sized hubs, and the San Francisco Mint struck the result.

The half dollar keeps his name alive among collectors, but it was a small part of a long career. That same year, 1936, Schnier cast six bronze relief panels for the elevator doors of the Helm Building in Fresno — farmhands, wine kegs, grape pickers, the labor of the San Joaquin Valley rendered in the streamlined Art Deco manner of the Depression years.

Then the war changed his hand. His work through the mid-1940s was figurative; after he served in the US Army in World War II, it turned abstract — looser, more organic, less interested in telling you what it was. The engineer never quite left, though. After he retired from Berkeley in 1966, Schnier devoted himself to carved and polished clear acrylic resin — Plexiglas — chasing the way light bends, reflects, and shatters inside a transparent block. It was an unlikely final act: the man who began with sugar-mill gears finished by sculpting light itself.

He wrote, too. A working scholar as much as a maker, he published Sculpture in Modern America (1948) and contributed papers on art and psychoanalysis to journals like the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and American Imago. He died in Walnut Creek, California, on March 8, 1988, at 89.