flat over an Italian bakery in Greenwich Village for a phase of their life that took them to the center of the art world in New York City. Weston was elected president of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, and launched the museum gift plan, a scheme by which donors paid artists for their work and then subsequently donated it to museums. He also joined the International Association of Plastic Arts (later the International Association of Art [IAA]) and, as a delegate, vice president, or president, attended all of the group's international meetings between 1954 in Venice and 1966 in Tokyo. Along with Lloyd Goodrich and Lillian Gish, in 1955 Weston founded the National Council on Arts and Government, an artists' group that lobbied for government support of the arts and that gathered the support of over 50 national organizations representing all of the arts. Weston served many years as its vice president and president. The group won passage of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 creating the National Endowment for the Arts. Weston, "more than any other private individual played a key role in the improvement of our government's relation to the arts in our time," wrote Lloyd Goodrich. Realism to abstraction In the years after the completion of "Building the United Nations," Weston gradually transitioned into abstraction while maintaining a precisionist style. A 1958 trip to the Isle of Rhodes in Greece was pivotal in introducing ocean motifs. Increasingly, he magnified nature's details, heightening its patterns and rhythms. He was excited by the new direction of his work, for which he had more time after the passage of the National Endowment for the Arts legislation in 1965. He painted his last significant body of work, the "Stone Series," from 1968 until his death in 1972, inspired by stones found on the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada. In 1971, Harold Weston published Freedom in the Wilds: A Saga of the Adirondacks, which is out of print, but a third, expanded edition was published in 2008 under the title Freedom in the Wilds: An Artist in the Adirondacks. Linking artistic creativity to wilderness conservation, Weston wrote: "The poet, composer, visual artist, and all those who are creative by instinct...can sense from a single fern frond, a leaf, a stone, or the song of a bird, the quintessence of the kind of freedom a wilderness