While living in the now-demolished Friars Club in Cincinnati, Ohio between 1941 and 1944, Lumen Martin Winter painted murals on the walls of the residents’ lounge. The 1,600 square-foot scenes, painted in tempera emulsion on a casein ground, depicted regional highlights of industry, music, religion, and literature. Winter had labored on the murals for four years, although his work was interrupted for 18 months while he was enlisted as a chief artist-illustrator for the Air Force’s Signal Corps. The murals were dedicated on November 12, 1944.
Winter was a celebrated American artist whose proficiency in paints and sculpture was well renowned and was a master of both painting and sculpture. Most of his 50 public art projects depicted a fusion of Classicism, Modernism Regionalism, and Romanticism styles, all well represented in the scenes depicted in the Friars Club.
Sadly, the Friars Club building and the acclaimed murals were demolished in 2010 after the organization had relocated to another building several years prior.
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