The 2nd started out as a rainy day so we skipped golf and headed to Winter Park Fl to do some inside activity. Rained while we were at the Morse but cleared so we decided to visit the Polasek of course after a great lunch in downtown.

The Morse Museum houses the world’s most comprehensive collection of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933), including the artist and designer’s jewelry, pottery, paintings, art glass, leaded-glass lamps and windows; his chapel interior from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and art and architectural objects from his Long Island country estate, Laurelton Hall. The Museum’s holdings also include American art pottery, late 19th- and early 20th-century American paintings, graphics, and decorative art.

Albin Polasek (1879 – 1965) is her­alded as one of America’s fore­most sculp­tors of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury.

Cel­e­brated in his own life­time, Polasek cre­ated fig­u­ra­tive works based upon the true struc­ture of nature. His goal was to show the essen­tial unity of form and the beauty of “move­ment,” the flow of one form into another. He felt that move­ment made the dif­fer­ence between a work exud­ing life and some­thing inan­i­mate. Polasek’s abil­ity to cap­ture the spirit of his sub­ject pro­vided inspi­ra­tion to suc­ces­sors such as Rich­mond Barthe, Sylvia Shaw Jud­son and Ruth Sherwood..

Born in 1879 in Fren­stat, Moravia (now Czech Repub­lic), Albin Polasek appren­ticed as a wood­carver in Vienna before immi­grat­ing to the United States in 1901 at the age of 22. After four years work­ing as a wood­carver in the Amer­i­can Mid­west, Polasek began his for­mal art train­ing at the Penn­syl­va­nia Acad­emy of the Fine Arts in Philadel­phia. Under the guid­ance of sculp­tor Charles Grafly, Polasek learned the tra­di­tional clas­si­cal tech­niques of sculpt­ing, while refin­ing his own dis­tinct style. As a stu­dent he first cre­ated Man Carv­ing His Own Des­tiny (1907) and Eter­nal Moment (1909), two of his ear­li­est well-known sculp­tures. In 1909, while still a stu­dent at the Penn­syl­va­nia Acad­emy, Polasek became an Amer­i­can citizen.