(From a letter written to Eisenhower from G.C. Marshall: I...)
From a letter written to Eisenhower from G.C. Marshall: In our recent exchange of redio grams on the subect you indicated your approval of a plan to send a small group of professionally qualified artists to your threater to obtain an historical record of the war in the form of drawings, paintings and other graphic media. This book contains a large number of these drawings. It became part of the Library for Serivce men in Farragut, Idaho
George Biddle was an American artist, muralist and lithographer. He was best known for his social realism and combat art.
Background
George Biddle was born on January 24, 1885, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Algernon Sydney Biddle and Frances Robinson. Through his lawyer father, he was descended from one of Pennsylvania's oldest and most distinguished Quaker families. On the maternal side, he could claim kinship with such notables as Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, and Robert E. Lee. Left fatherless at the age of seven, Biddle passed his early childhood just outside of Philadelphia. Among his closest boyhood companions was his brother Francis, who later became attorney general of the United States.
Education
In 1892, following a tour of Europe, George entered Haverford School, and in 1898 he was sent off to boarding school at the Groton School in Groton, Massachussets. A breakdown in health, however, forced Biddle to drop out of Groton in 1901, and he did not complete his secondary education there until the spring of 1904. The following fall he went to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree in 1908, receiving a law degree there three years later. By then, however, Biddle knew that he would never practice law. Thanks largely to his tour of some of the great European art collections, his interest in drawing and painting, which had periodically manifested itself since his childhood, had become a full-blown passion. As a result, shortly after earning his law degree, he began a year of study at the Julien Academy in Paris, which was followed by a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Career
Returning to Europe in 1913, Biddle worked under the tutelage of the American impressionist Frederick Frieseke in France. While there, he also became friendly with Mary Cassatt, whose works, along with those of Edgar Degas, had a marked influence on Biddle's early style. In 1916 Biddle returned to Philadelphia, and shortly after the United States' entry into World War I, he enlisted in the army. In August 1917 he was commissioned a lieutenant and by fall he was on his way to Europe, where his fluency in German led to his assignment with the army's enemy intelligence section. Leaving the service as a captain, he returned to the United States early in 1919.
Seeking escape from both his domestic difficulties and the painful memories of war, Biddle spent a large portion of the years 1920 through 1922 in Tahiti, where he painted and engaged in printmaking. The tropical Polynesian environment had much the same effect on Biddle that it had had on Paul Gauguin many years earlier. Thus, the shift in Biddle's work toward more exuberant color, flattened perspectives, and greater concern for overall pattern bore striking similarity to Gauguin's stylistic evolution in Tahiti. Biddle's works from Tahiti won considerable praise and sold well when they were shown in New York. But this first substantial success of his career did not allay the artist's own uneasiness with his progress.
In 1923 Biddle went to Paris, where he spent much of the next three years. There, largely under the influence of the painter Jules Pascin, he began evolving a style that was fundamentally realistic but also contained strong elements of expressive distortion and caricature. In the process the design of his works became looser and more fluid. In the spring of 1929, Biddle began building a residence and studio in suburban Croton-on-Hudson, New York, which was to be his home base for the rest of his life.
By 1930 Biddle was firmly entrenched in the New York art community and known primarily as an easel painter and printmaker whose subjects included portraiture, landscape, and figurative genre. By then, however, inspired in large part by the Mexican renaissance in mural art, he was becoming interested in that branch of his profession as well, and in 1933 he completed a mural on agriculture for Chicago's Century of Progress exposition. That same year, motivated by concern for the social problems of the Great Depression and a conviction that art could help in alleviating those problems, he approached President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he had known at Groton and Harvard, with a proposal for a federal program for producing murals promoting American ideals. Eventually this lobbying effort gave birth to the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Program, through which many artists, impoverished by the depression, found gainful employment.
For Biddle himself, it led to a commission for a mural at the Department of Justice in Washington, D. C. Completed in 1936, this multipaneled work depicts the contrasts between an exploitative social order and one founded on principles of equality and justice. At its unveiling, one critic said it was an "example of the poisonous pattern of Moscow that is being shoved down the American throat. " Several years later Biddle defended himself against such criticism, at least indirectly, in his autobiography, An American Artist's Story (1939), where he argued for the artist's obligation to involve himself in bettering society according to his political lights.
In 1942 Biddle went to Brazil, where he collaborated with his wife on murals and bas-reliefs for Rio de Janeiro's National Library. Upon returning to the United States, he went to Washington, D. C. , where he spearheaded the organization of an army-sponsored group of artists assigned to chronicling the military operations of World War II. Congress ultimately cut the program, however, and many of the artists involved ended up working as correspondents for Life. Among those enlisted by Life was Biddle, who covered the war in North Africa and Italy. Shortly after completing these assignments he published Artist at War (1944), a diary account of his combat artist's experience. Appointed to the federal Fine Arts Commission in 1950, Biddle continued to pursue his painting and printmaking endeavors. Among his last works was a series of lithographs recording his impressions of India from a visit in 1959. He died at his home in Croton-on-Hudson.
George Biddle served as President of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1935 to 1936.
Connections
In August 1917 Biddle married Anne (Nancy) Coleman. Three years later Biddle and his wife were divorced. He married Jane Belo in 1925; they divorced four years later. On April 17, 1931, he married sculptor Helene Sardeau, with whom he had a son.