Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Leon Bibel: Forgotten Artist of the New Deal

Leon Bibel: Forgotten Artist of the New Deal

Haw, Richard

Hardcover

Artists20th Century United States HistoryIndividual Artists

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1978825757
ISBN13: 9781978825758
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: May 13 2025
Pages: 312
Weight: 2.94
Height: 0.92 Width: 8.93 Depth: 11.28
Language: English

Honorable Mention for the 2025 New Deal Book Award

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.

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