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3 books match the query 'New Deal art'
Leon Bibel
Forgotten Artist of the New DealRichard Haw
Rutgers University Press, 2025
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.
New Deal Art in Arizona
Betsy Fahlman
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Art is a powerful instrument of historical record and cultural construction, and many of the issues captured by the Farm Security Administration photographers remain significant issues today: migratory labor, the economic volatility of the mining industry, tourism, and water usage. Art tells important stories, too, including the work of Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake in Arizona’s internment camps, murals by Native American artist Gerald Nailor for the Navajo Nation Council Chamber in Window Rock, and African American themes at Fort Huachuca. Illustrated with 100 black-andwhite photographs and covering a wide range of both media and themes, this fascinating and accessible volume reclaims a richly textured story of Arizona history with potent lessons for today.
The Coit Tower Murals
New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San FranciscoRobert W. Cherny
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Created in 1934, the Coit Tower murals were sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first of the New Deal art programs. Twenty-five master artists and their assistants worked there, most of them in buon fresco, Nearly all of them drew upon the palette and style of Diego Rivera. The project boosted the careers of Victor Arnautoff, Lucien Labaudt, Bernard Zakheim, and others, but Communist symbols in a few murals sparked the first of many national controversies over New Deal art.
Sixty full-color photographs illustrate Robert Cherny’s history of the murals from their conception and completion through their evolution into a beloved San Francisco landmark. Cherny traces and critiques the treatment of the murals by art critics and historians. He also probes the legacies of Coit Tower and the PWAP before surveying San Francisco’s recent controversies over New Deal murals.
An engaging account of an artistic landmark, The Coit Tower Murals tells the full story behind a public art masterpiece.