Background
Leon Bibel was born in Poland, growing up in the shtetl of Szczebrzeszyn.
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Leon Bibel
Edit ProfileEducation
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 Zakheim (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.
Career
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 arkansas
He immigrated to the United States with his family.
He resided in New York beginning in 1936 as a World Pet Association artist of the Federal Art Project at the Harlem Community 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 South 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. (He is the first man in Depression Bread Lincolnshire, Segal"s group of bronzed figures at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, included in Public Broadcasting Service’s "George Segal: American Still Life").
Bibel"s work may be found at Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the B"nai Brith"s Klutznick Museum, and the museums of Rutgers University and Princeton Universities. Bibel"s work has been featured in posthumous exhibitions in Philadelphia in 2011 and in Virginia in 2013.
