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 Lithuanian immigrants. His father was a machinist who moonlighted as a stage magician. His mother walked him through the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum — the rooms that, by his own telling, set the course of his life.

In 1956, just shy of eighteen, he enlisted in the Navy. He served three years aboard the destroyer USS Kenneth D. Bailey, sailing with the Atlantic Fleet into the Mediterranean and to Cuba as a gunner's mate. Those years at sea never left his work. Decades later he would paint Melville's Moby-Dick and the naval battles of the Pacific, again and again, like a man returning to a port he couldn't quite leave.

After the Navy he studied commercial art at Chicago's American Academy of Art and spent years as a graphic artist — including a long run at the Chicago Sun-Times. But the work that mattered to him was the fine art he made on his own, self-taught: dreamlike, meticulous, often nautical paintings and carved-and-painted wooden constructions. That blend of discipline and strangeness is what eventually put his hand on a coin.

Klauba is not a Mint engraver. He's an outsider to numismatics — and that's exactly why his one coin is interesting. The U.S. Mint reached past its own staff for the 1991–1995 World War II 50th Anniversary commemorative, and Klauba's design won the obverse of the half dollar. (The obverse is the "heads" side of a coin.) For an artist whose imagination ran on warships and the sea, it was a near-perfect commission.

His obverse packs the whole war onto one small face of metal: three U.S. service members — a soldier, a sailor, and an airman — looking up and to the left, set against a "V" for victory, with a B-17 bomber and five stars riding above them. It reads as memory rather than reportage, more dream than diorama — recognizably the work of the painter, not a heraldic committee. A Mint sculptor-engraver translated his drawing into the low relief a coin requires (catalogs credit T. James Ferrell with modeling the obverse); the design is Klauba's.

The fit wasn't an accident. Just three years before the coin, Klauba had won the Pauline Palmer Prize at the 1990 Chicago show for a painted wood carving steeped in World War II naval imagery — the same well he'd drawn from since his own service. The Mint, in effect, found an artist who had already spent decades rehearsing this subject.