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Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

1913-1995

Leon Bibel, a painter, printmaker and sculptor, was born in Poland in 1913 but moved with his family to San Francisco as a child. He trained at the California School of Fine Arts and received a scholarship to study under the German Impressionist Maria Riedelstein. He worked in collaboration with Bernard Zackheim, a student of Diego Rivera, to create frescoes for the San Francisco Jewish Community Center and the University of California Medical School. In 1936, Bibel moved from California to join the Federal Art Project of the New York City Work Projects Administration. He was assigned to the Graphic Art Project and the Easel Project at Harlem Art Center. He also taught at both PS 94 Kings College School and Bronx House in New York City. Bibel’s program in the WPA ended in 1941 and he moved with his wife to South Brunswick, New Jersey, ceasing his artistic pursuits to support his family. He resumed his artistic work in the early 1960s and continued to explore the mediums of painting and sculpture until his death. A constant innovator, Bibel experimented with diverse printmaking mediums. His work is distinguished by its boldly conceived, dramatic composition and passionately executed expressionist renderings. Bibel's parents immigrated from Poland and he remained staunchly pacifist, even throughout WWII. Much of his work during this period focused on the destructiveness of war and the consequent suffering and alienation of humankind. An artist of the people, his work is imbued with a sense of humanity and a concern for social justice and the plight of the working man. Bibel’s numerous exhibitions include the solo exhibition at Newark Museum in 1966, Jersey City Museum in 1967, Hunterdon Art Museum, Rutgers State University and New Jersey State Museum in 1978. He has also exhibited at Rider College, in 1983, Rutgers Hillel Foundation from 1985–86. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Newark Museum, the Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Klutznick Museum and the New Brunswick State Theater, as well as many corporate and private collections.

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Artist: Leon Bibel
'Unemployed Marchers' — American Modernism, WPA
By Leon Bibel
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Leon Bibel, 'Unemployed Marchers', 2-color lithograph, c. 1938, edition 25. Signed, titled, and numbered '2/25' in pencil. A fine, richly-inked impression on off-white, wove paper, w...
Category

1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

'Archway' — American Modernism, WPA
By Leon Bibel
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Leon Bibel, 'Archway', color serigraph, 1939, edition 25. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered ' /25' in pencil. A rich, painterly impression, with fresh colors, on buff wove paper; ...
Category

1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Screen

"Balcony" 1938 WPA Print Mid 20th Century American Broadway Theatre Modernism
By Leon Bibel
Located in New York, NY
"Balcony" 1938 WPA Print Mid 20th Century American Broadway Theatre Modernism. Silk screen on paper, 15” x 20". Numbered 15/20 lower left. Pencil si...
Category

1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Screen

'Clown' — WPA American Expressionism
By Leon Bibel
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Leon Bibel, 'Clown', color serigraph, 1939, edition 20. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '/20' in pencil. A fine, richly-inked, painterly impression, with fresh colors, on buff la...
Category

1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Screen

'Food Not Cannon' — WPA Modernist Work of Social Conscience
By Leon Bibel
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Leon Bibel, 'Food Not Cannon', etching, 1937, edition 12 (an early state, probably unique). Signed in pencil. A fine impression, on cream wove paper, with full margins (7/8 to 2 1/8 ...
Category

1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

'Abstract Boats' — American Modernism, WPA
By Leon Bibel
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Leon Bibel, 'Abstract Boats', color serigraph, 1938, edition 12. Signed, dated, and numbered ' /12' in pencil. A fine, painterly impression, with fresh colors, on buff wove paper; t...
Category

1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Screen

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Hand Signed Norman Rockwell "No Swimming" Print
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Baden Baden, Casino
By LeRoy Neiman
Located in San Francisco, CA
This artwork titled "Baden Baden, Casino" 1988 is an original color serigraph by noted American artist LeRoy Neiman, 1921-2012. It is hand signed and numbered 261/375 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 36 x 42 inches, sheet size is 42 x 48 inches. With the blind stamp of the printer Styria Studio at the lower left corner margin. It is in excellent condition, three small pieces of hanging tape remain on the back. About the artist: Mr. Neiman's kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the horse races at Deauville, France, and the Cannes Film Festival. Quite consciously, he cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes. Mr. Neiman often painted or sketched on live television. With the camera recording his progress at the sketchpad or easel, he interpreted the drama of Olympic Games and Super Bowls for an audience of millions. When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky faced off in Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide the world chess championship, Mr. Neiman was there, sketching. He was on hand to capture Federico Fellini directing "8 ½" and the Kirov Ballet performing in the Soviet Union. In popularity, Mr. Neiman rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth. A prolific one-man industry, he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited-edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial — magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care. Maybe the critics are right," he told American Artist magazine in 1995. "But what am I supposed to do about it — stop painting, change my work completely? I go back into the studio, and there I am at the easel again. I enjoy what I'm doing and feel good working. Other thoughts are just crowded out." His image suggested an artist well beyond the reach of criticism. A dandy and bon vivant, he cut an arresting figure with his luxuriant ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, flashy hats and Cuban cigars. "He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became Mr. Playboy in the late '50s," Hugh Hefner told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1995. LeRoy Runquist was born on June 8, 1921, in St. Paul. His father, a railroad worker, deserted the family when LeRoy was quite young, and the boy took the surname of his stepfather. He showed a flair for art at an early age. While attending a local Roman Catholic school, he impressed schoolmates by drawing ink tattoos on their arms during recess. As a teenager, he earned money doing illustrations for local grocery stores. "I'd sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices," he told Cigar Aficionado. "And then I had the good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me tremendous power as a kid." After being drafted into the Army in 1942, he served as a cook in the European theater but in his spare time painted risqué murals on the walls of kitchens and mess halls. The Army's Special Services Division, recognizing his talent, put him to work painting stage sets for Red Cross shows when he was stationed in Germany after the war. On leaving the military, he studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) before enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after four years of study, he taught figure drawing and fashion illustration throughout the 1950s. When the janitor of the apartment building next door to his threw out half-empty cans of enamel house paint, Mr. Neiman found his métier. Experimenting with the new medium, he embraced a rapid style of applying paint to canvas imposed by the free-flowing quality of the house paint. While doing freelance fashion illustration for the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago in the early 1950s, he became friendly with Mr. Hefner, a copywriter there who was on the verge of publishing the first issue of a men's magazine. In 1954, after five issues of Playboy had appeared, Mr. Neiman ran into Mr. Hefner and invited him to his apartment to see his paintings of boxers, strip clubs and restaurants. Mr. Hefner, impressed, showed the work to Playboy's art director, Art Paul, who commissioned an illustration for "Black Country," a story by Charles Beaumont about a jazz musician. Thus began a relationship that endured for more than half a century and established Mr. Neiman's reputation. In 1955, when Mr. Hefner decided that the party-jokes page needed visual interest, Mr. Neiman came up with the Femlin, a curvaceous brunette who cavorted across the page in thigh-high stockings, high-heeled shoes, opera gloves and nothing else. She appeared in every issue of the magazine thereafter. Three years later, Mr. Neiman devised a running feature, "Man at His Leisure." For the next 15 years, he went on assignment to glamour spots around the world, sending back visual reports on subjects as varied as the races at Royal Ascot, the dining room of the Tour d'Argent in Paris, the nude beaches of the Dalmatian coast, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and Carnaby Street in swinging London. He later produced more than 100 paintings and 2 murals for 18 of the Playboy clubs that opened around the world. "Playboy made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings — not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself," Mr. Neiman told V.I.P. magazine in 1962. Working in the same copywriting department at Carson Pirie Scott as Mr. Hefner was Janet Byrne, a student at the Art Institute. She and Mr. Neiman married in 1957. She survives him. A prolific artist, he generated dozens of paintings each year that routinely commanded five-figure prices. When Christie's auctioned off the Playboy archives in 2003, his 1969 painting Man at His Leisure: Le Mans sold for $107,550. Sales of the signed, limited-edition print versions of his paintings, published in editions of 250 to 500, became a lucrative business in itself after Knoedler Publishing, a wholesale operation, was created in 1975 to publish and distribute his serigraphs, etchings, books and posters. Mr. Neiman's most famous images came from the world of sports. His long association with the Olympics began with the Winter Games in Squaw Valley in 1960, and he went on to cover the games, on live television, in Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976, Lake Placid in 1980, and Sarajevo and Los Angeles in 1984, using watercolor, ink or felt-tip marker to produce images with the dispatch of a courtroom sketch artist. At the 1978 and 1979 Super Bowls, he used a computerized electronic pen to portray the action for CBS. Although he was best known for scenes filled with people and incident, he also painted many portraits. 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21st Century and Contemporary American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

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Baden Baden, Casino
Baden Baden, Casino
H 42 in W 48 in D 0.01 in
1930s Black & White Print of Grand Lake Yacht Races in Colorado Mountain Lake
By Arnold Rönnebeck
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This vintage 1930s black and white lithograph by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947), a prominent Colorado artist from the WPA era, beautifully captures the Grand Lake...
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1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

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Cypriano (A Basque Boy)
By Gerald Leslie Brockhurst
Located in Middletown, NY
Etching on cream wove paper. 6 5/16 x 3 3/4 inches (159 x 94 mm), full margin. Signed in pencil lower center margin, from the edition of 111. A well inked impression with a minor cre...
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Mid-20th Century American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

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Ratfinkbonerthunk : Surrealist Rat - Original Giclee Print, Handsigned
By Kenny Scharf
Located in Paris, IDF
Kenny Scharf Ratfinkbonerthunk : Surrealist Rat, 1990 Original Giclee Print Handsigned in pencil On Arches vellum 56 x 76 cm (c. 22 x 30 in) Published by Editions Vermorel in 1990 ...
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1990s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

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Ethel Katz, Fur Sources, New Deal-era lithograph of sweatshop
Located in New York, NY
This is a classic New-Deal image: claustrophobic sweatshop with a row of hunched tailors. The windows and lamps offer light at least. But there is a major difference between this and...
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1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

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Previously Available Items
War Casualty — American Surrealism, Spanish Civil War, Anti-Fascism
By Leon Bibel
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Leon Bibel, 'War Casualty', etching, 1937, edition 6. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '5/6' in pencil. A fine, richly-inked impression, on cream wove paper, with full margins (1/2 to 1 7/8 inches); slight toning at the sheet edges, otherwise in excellent condition. Very scarce. Image size 7 3/8 x 9 7/8 inches (187 x 251 mm); sheet size 10 5/8 x 11 3/8 inches (270 x 289 mm). Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. Created at the time of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler in Germany, this work stands as one of the most powerful surrealist/modernist anti-war images of the Work Progress Administration (WPA) period. ABOUT THE ARTIST Painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Leon Bibel, was born in Poland in 1913 but moved with his family to San Francisco as a child. He trained at the California School of Fine Arts and received a scholarship to study under the German Impressionist Maria Riedelstein. He worked in collaboration with Bernard Zackheim, a student of Diego Rivera, to create frescoes for the San Francisco Jewish Community Center and the University of California Medical School. In 1936 Bibel moved from California to join the Federal Art Project of the New York City WPA. He was assigned to the Graphic Art Project and the Easel Project at Harlem Art...
Category

1930s Surrealist Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Etching

George Washington Bridge
By Leon Bibel
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Leon Bibel, 'G. W. Bridge', lithograph, 1938, edition 10. Signed 'L Bibel', dated, titled, and numbered '/10' in pencil. A superb, finely-nuanced impression, on off-white, wove paper...
Category

1930s American Modern Leon Bibel Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Leon Bibel figurative prints for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Leon Bibel figurative prints available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Leon Bibel in lithograph, screen print, etching and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 1930s and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Leon Bibel figurative prints, so small editions measuring 10 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Samuel Chamberlain, Jacques La Grange, and Donald Shaw MacLaughlan. Leon Bibel figurative prints prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $2,400 and tops out at $7,500, while the average work can sell for $2,600.

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