Leon Bibel

Forgotten Artist of the New Deal

Richard Haw (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

312 Seiten

2025
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
978-1-9788-2575-8 (ISBN)

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Leon Bibel (1913–1995) was a prolific modern American artist who painted, printed, stamped, etched, sketched, and carved. He produced pieces that ranged from social realism to dreamy expressionism and was an aesthetic experimentalist, never working for too long in any medium or style. And despite Bibel's obvious talent, his work would have languished in obscurity were it not for the New Deal programs like the Federal Art Project and Public Works of Art Project.

Leon Bibel, the first biography of this eclectic artist, recounts his life from his birth in Szczebrzeszyn, Poland, in 1913, to his death in New Jersey in 1995. After immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, Bibel came of age during the Great Depression, when New Deal agencies recognized his abilities and supported his artistic endeavors. Working-class artists faced challenges after these programs folded, and Bibel would later spend twenty years as a New Jersey chicken farmer before resurrecting his art career in the 1960s.

Historian Richard Haw shows how Bibel's life was defined by the New Deal, his visionary artwork shaped by the era's commitment to social and economic justice. With reproductions of more than 240 of Bibel's works, most in vivid color, this book reveals how he depicted everything from the trauma of unemployment to the dignity of work, from the horrors of lynching to the pleasures of everyday life.

RICHARD HAW is a professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He is the author of The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History, Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History, and Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling.

Introduction: Leon Bibel, American Art, and the New Deal
1   Beginning: Freedom and Tradition in a Polish Shtetl (1912-1926)
2   Learning: Art and Diversity in San Francisco (1927-1935)
3   Arriving: An Artist in New York (1935-1936)
4   Thriving: New York and the Federal Art Project (1936-1938)
5   Departing: The End of New York (1938-1942)
6   Living: An Artist and a Chicken Farmer in New Jersey (1942-1995)
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	07.05.2025
Zusatzinfo	126 color and 119 B-W images
Verlagsort	New Brunswick NJ
Sprache	englisch
Maße	216 x 286 mm
Gewicht	1306 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Fotokunst
	Technik ► Architektur
ISBN-10	1-9788-2575-7 / 1978825757
ISBN-13	978-1-9788-2575-8 / 9781978825758
Zustand	Neuware