When news got around that Martin Schweig Jr. was ill, and that his illness was terminal, a group of friends made it their business to make certain this remarkable, durable, energetic, and brilliant man got out and about.
That was the genesis of a bittersweet series of lunches dedicated to Martin. As you might expect, those occasions are recalled as having been consumed as much for the pleasure and nourishment of the friends as they were for Mr. Schweig. No matter. They were rich and good.
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James Dwyer, a developer and Central West End pillar and a long-time friend of Mr. Schweig, was one of this group, and he had a bright idea: instead of lunch, he would serve up time and space, observed in rides all over St. Louis.
Mr. Schweig died Thursday, March 22 at home, surrounded by a lifetime’s collection of beautiful things. He was 93 years old. Thus the finale to Adventures with Jim was barely two weeks ago. It was then Dwyer and Mr. Schweig headed for the Near North Side to look at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency site, at Old North renovations and the good and the bad, the building up and the falling down, and the hopes and disappointments that are characteristics of that changing and fraught landscape.
In a way, Mr. Schweig was in ancestral stomping grounds. His mother’s family was in the cigar business; they lived near the old Benjamin Franklin School on 19th Street between Delmar and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. When his grandfather, the immigrant photographer Morris Schweig set up his own studio, it was in a building at 1717 Franklin Avenue (now MLK Drive).
When Mr. Schweig and and Dwyer returned home, the older fellow said two things: first, he wished he could trade in some of his brain power for added strength in his legs. Second, in an ironic proclamation, thanks to these forays, he said, his current awareness of St. Louis was far greater than the quotidian.
“Now that I’ve seen North St. Louis, I know more about St. Louis than anyone else,” he said mischievously. And debatably, perhaps, but it was a signifier of his self-assurance of his role as a rooted St. Louisan. His family has been here for four generations; he belongs to the third.
His name may be most familiar because it’s embossed on thousands of photographs of thousands of St. Louisans.
His photographs of the worlds through which he moved are more involving—indelible, warm in tone with a slight bite, thanks to the quality of a matte finish paper no longer made—and genius in the darkroom.
He was from childhood a person of wide interests: he loved animals, and from time to time his house and yard in the West End assumed status as animal nursing home and Zoo.
There were finches and parrots and owls, and fish luxuriating in his backyard reflecting pool. And there was that python that feasted on fully feathered chickens, purchased dead but warmed up and plumped up in the clothes dryer. Once he had a pet lion, and took it for walks on a leash in his neighborhood, to the delight of children and their terrified parents.
There is considerably more. Mr. Schweig’s influence and impact reached deeply and with distinction into the worlds of historic preservation (he, with Jim Dwyer and the late George Schlapp, sued to put the kibosh on Alfonso J. Cervantes’s Maryland Plaza redevelopment project, which he regarded as an abomination.)
And although conservation, animal advocacy, horticulture, the promotion of local and regional art and artists and his freelance rescue service were in play much of the time, the constant was St. Louis. His love and critical concern for it was bred in the bone.
He came from a family of successful artists and photographers. His grandfather, Morris, established the name Schweig as a gold standard for photography in St. Louis. Mr. Schweig’s father, Martin Sr., brought it to greater prominence for quality and imagination when he spooled his talents into motion picture photography, thus bringing “the pictures” into the family repertory. Mr. Schweig recalled his father standing on the roof of the family car to get clear shots over the heads of the crowds.
His mother, the artist Aimee Schweig, helped to found a regional artists’ colony in Ste. Genevieve. His sister, Martyl Langsdorf, was an artist too. Although remembered principally for having designed the Doomsday Clock, she was also a well-known painter; she produced murals for post offices and other government buildings (including the mural inside the Ste. Genevieve post office). Her best work, however, was on a smaller scale, and she had a successful career showing that work. She painted well into her 90s. Mr. Schweig’s son, Martin III, who survives him, continued the fine-photograph tradition that is his family’s hallmark, and his inheritance from them.
Mr. Schweig was nimble enough to dance the tricky steps of a tango that took him in black tie at one moment to the St. Louis Country Club to photograph the local gentry, and on from there into flannel shirts and the arms of the Coalition for the Environment.
Similarly, he switched metaphorical lenses and brought forth photographs that transcended brides and family portraits and moved luminously into the realm of art. There they hang indelibly on the walls of the soul.
For many years, he was the director and ringmaster of the Martin Schweig Studio and Gallery, which was home for many a local artist. The gallery started life on Delmar Boulevard as Schweig Art Nouveau, then moved to two different addresses on Maryland Avenue later on. His mother insisted on the gallery as a companion, not an adjunct, to the studio.
Mr. Schweig was also a partner in Ferrario, a modern home furnishings store on Euclid. For a while this store, with its bolts of Marimekko fabrics and its magical Noguchi lamps and the sensuous curves of Alvar Aalto designed glassware, was the only place in town where such modernist exotica could be found.
Mr. Schweig was an alumnus of John Burroughs School, where he learned some of those tango steps that served him so well. (Burroughs recently honored him with a retrospective exhibition.) He attended the University of Hawaii, and after his service in the U.S. Army in the Pacific in World War II, he returned home and studied at Washington University in St. Louis before going into business with his father.
Besides his work with the Coalition for the Environment, he worked for other organizations focused on the protection and preservation of living things, and for the advancement of art. He served on the board of Young Audiences, and as a commissioner of the Missouri Botanical Garden. He was on the board of the Henry Shaw Cactus and Succulent Society. His passion for animals played out in bright lights at the Animal Protective Association, where he once served as president, and on whose board he continued to serve. The APA named its Hanley Road building in his honor.
Survivors include his son, Martin Schweig III; his wife, Terrie Liberman; a stepdaughter, Joan Butcher, and her children, Tess and Emma; a stepson, Tom Liberman; and a nephew whom he reared, Charles Clark. His marriage to the late Frances Galt Schweig ended in divorce.
A family memorial service for Mr. Schweig is to be private.
