Jacques Schnier

Jacques Schnier (December 25, 1898 – March 8, 1988) was a Romanian-born American artist, sculptor, author, educator, and engineer. He was a sculpture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1936 to 1966.

Early life and education Jacques Preston Schnier was born on December 25, 1898, in Constanța, Romania; and he moved to the United States with his family in 1903. After receiving his engineering degree, he worked as an engineer at the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Company (also known as Makaweli Plantation) in Kauai, Hawaii, until 1923. Schnier then left engineering and earned an M.A. degree in sociology in 1939 from the University of California, Berkeley. His first role at UC Berkeley was as a modeling instructor in the department of architecture, succeeding Melvin Earl Cummings. Schnier also taught at the School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now the California College of the Arts).

He conducted research on psychoanalysis and wrote books on the subject. In the 1960s, his work started to look more organic in shape. The front of the coin featured a portrait of Monarch II, the last of the San Francisco–bred grizzly bears; and the back of the coin featured the Bay Bridge and the Ferry Building, as seen from San Francisco. Crocker Art Museum (1963), the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Crocker Art Museum, and Stanford University Museum of Art.

Publications

Art exhibition-related

Exhibitions

1949 – solo exhibition, Oakland Art Gallery (now Oakland Museum of California), Oakland, California 1963 – solo exhibition and retrospective, E. B. Crocker Gallery (now Crocker Museum), Sacramento, California