Citizen Biddle
Fig. 1. Bulldogging by George Biddle (1885– 1973), 1937. Signed and dated “Biddle. 1937” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 40 by 50 inches. Except as noted, the objects illustrated are in the collection of the Michael Biddle Family; photographs are courtesy of the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia. George Biddle wasn’t having it. “No more Hellenic nudes representing the spirit of American Motherhood, Purity, Democracy and the Pioneer Spirit,” he declaimed in the March 1934 issue of Scribner’s Magazine.1 Hailing the nascent back-to-work mural program of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, he called for robust, realist paeans to agriculture and industry, education and invention—the whole gamut of muscular American life in the twentieth century. A well-born Philadelphian whose surname is synonymous with success and civic engagement in Pennsylvania and beyond, Biddle practiced what he preached. Committed to representation, his own work was informed by a Deweyesque sense of art as a purposeful, moral experience more than as a product or purely creative gesture. With George Biddle: The Art of American Social Conscience, Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum explores the career and motivating philosophy of a native son whose name is less familiar than it was, but who was very much a part of one of the more singular (albeit brief ) eras in American art. From left to right: Fig. 2. Prosit, 1933. Signed and dated “Biddle 1933” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 8 7/8 by 11 7/8 inches. Fig. 3. In a Brazilian Lunatic Asylum, 1942. Signed and dated “George Biddle/ 1942” at lower left. Oil on panel, 11 ¾ by 8 7/8 inches. As comfortable and well-connected as he was (Mary Cassatt took him in hand when he arrived in Paris after Harvard Law School to study at the Académie Julian), Biddle was very much a working