Albert Wein (1915-1991) believed that "every good work of art is a good abstract composition," or could at least be represented by one. In his view, the subject, devoid of details and pared down to only what is necessary to convey the essence of the composition, was what really mattered in a truly great work of art. This recipient of the coveted Prix de Rome and participant in the watershed 1951 exhibition American Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considered by many to be one of the most important early exhibitions of modernist sculpture in America, brought this conviction to a genuinely dual career in both sculpture and painting.

Wein was an artist of innate talent. Sculpture was his primary focus, but he could apply his hand to any art form and exhibit a facile mastery of the medium. He had a wonderful facility with line and was a beautiful draftsman. During the 1950s and 1960s Wein produced a substantial body of canvases and works on paper in the avant-garde abstract manner that prevailed at that time, and whether working in abstract sculpture or abstract painting, his subject matter and approach were never superficial.

Born in New York in 1915, Wein was the only son of the accomplished woman artist Elsa Wein, whose profound commitment to nurturing her son's seemingly insatiable appetite for artistic expression shaped his entire artistic development. To say that Wein was a child prodigy is no mere boast. In 1927, when he was just twelve years old, his mother moved the family to Maryland so she could enroll herself and her son at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which adhered to a curriculum of academic-based Classicism. Wein was the youngest student ever to enroll in the college art courses at the Institute. The 1929 stock market crash forced the family to return to New York, where at fourteen he sought out study in the Life Drawing Class of the American Impressionist Ivan Olinsky at the National Academy of Design. Olinsky at first refused, since no fourteen-year-old had ever been admitted to a Life Drawing Class at the Academy, but after meeting the serious young applicant he made an exception.

In 1932 Wein enrolled at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York, and the following year he began study at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. Around this time he sculpted Adam, an early Cubist-influenced modernist work that served as a precursor to what he would later describe as his lifelong effort to "modernize and stylize the classical tradition." In 1934 he joined the WPA, and in this productive period he produced many fine works for private commissions and award-winning competitions.

Wein received the coveted Prix de Rome, the Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, the Rockefeller Foundation grant, and numerous other major honors during his career. In 1979 he was elected a full Academician of the National Academy of Design. Some of his important commissions include those for Brookgreen Gardens, the Steuben Glass Company, the Bronx Zoo, the Franklin Mint, and the Libby Dam bas-relief. The Libby Dam project was a massive artistic and engineering accomplishment. The three-story sculpture Wein created is the world's largest granite bas-relief carving, weighing some seventy tons, and it took a team working under his direction three years to complete. Wein also painted in a purely Abstract Expressionist style, and few artists of the twentieth century so successfully balanced the extremes of Classicism and Modernism. He passed away unexpectedly in March of 1991. As his close friend Gordon Friedlander eloquently observed: "Albert's work will live on and will endure. These sculptures have already passed the test of time, the true measure of the worth of all creative people."