Leon Bibel

Leon Bibel (1913-1995) was was a Polish-American painter and printmaker during the Great Depression. His themes were the social condition of workers and the politics of protest and war, although cityscapes and landscapes were included among his works. He later developed works in wood of especially Jewish themes. These included fanciful miniature buildings influenced by European spice boxes, figures and objects within shadow boxes, and in one case a synagogue ark.

Related Topics:
Great Depression - Synagogue - Ark

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Leon Bibel was born in Poland, growing up in the shtetl of Szczebrzeszyn . He immigrated to the United States with his family. After graduating from Polytechnic High School in San Francisco, he trained at the California School of Fine Arts and apprenticed under the German Impressionist Maria Riedelstein and assisted Bernard Zackheim (a student of Diego Rivera), on the frescoes of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center and the University of California at San Francisco's Toland Hall. He resided in New York beginning in 1936 as a WPA artist of the Federal Art Project at the Harlem Art Center in New York City. He also taught art at both P.S. 94 and Bronx House. At the start of the Second World War, he and a number of other New York artists moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to make a living as chicken farmers. By the 1960s, Bibel returned to art, focusing on wood-based sculptures. He died in 1995.

Related Topics:
Shtetl - San Francisco - Maria Riedelstein - Bernard Zackheim - Diego Rivera - University of California at San Francisco - New York - 1936 - WPA - Federal Art Project - Harlem Art Center - Bronx House - Second World War - New Brunswick, New Jersey

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Bibel's work may be found at Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the B'nai Brith's Klutznick Museum,and the museums of Rutgers University and Princeton Universities.

Related Topics:
Metropolitan Museum of Art - Museum of Fine Arts in Boston - B'nai Brith - Klutznick Museum - Rutgers University - Princeton Universities

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He was a friend and neighbor of the American sculpture George Segal, and was both an anonymous and named character of Segal's arrays and portraits. (He is the first man in Depression Bread Line, Segal's group of bronzed figures at the FDR Memorial, included in PBS?s "George Segal: American Still Life".)

Related Topics:
George Segal - FDR Memorial - PBS

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