Edward Biberman (1904 – 1986)

Construction Workers (No. 3), c. 1950s, oil on Masonite, 48 x 25 ¼ inches, signed lower right, titled verso, 48 x 25 1/2 inches, illustrated in Kaufman, Jeffrey, Brush with Life: The Art of Being Edward Biberman (2007), 85 minutes (film), referenced in Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait, audio interview conducted by Emily Corey under the auspices of the Oral History Program University of California Los Angeles, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, November 23, 1975 - March 4, 1976 (8.5 hours total), presented in its original frame

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Edward Biberman was born in Philadelphia, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. His artistic career started at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts followed by three years of study in Paris, where he associated closely with Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi and exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, Grand Palais, in 1927 and the Salon des Independents in 1929. Upon his return to the United States, Biberman lived in New York City, where he showed at many of the city’s premier galleries and museums. His works were selected for several of the Museum of Modern Art’s early exhibitions of American artists, including 46 Painters and Sculptors Under the Age of 35 (1930) and Murals by American Painters and Photographers (1932). Hoping to escape the pressures of the New York art world, Biberman moved to Los Angeles in 1936 where he could be close to his family, including his film director brother, Herbert Biberman, and his sister-in-law, the Academy Award winning actress, Gale Sondergaard. 

During his long career, Biberman also showed at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Whitney), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and dozens of other museums and galleries across the United States and in Europe. Biberman completed three murals for public works projects, including Abbot Kinney and the Story of Venice for the Venice Post Office (Venice, CA), which was installed for six months at LACMA in 2014. His works are in the permanent collections of more than a dozen museums, including the Whitney, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Portrait Gallery (of the Smithsonian Institute), Butler Institute of American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and LACMA. Several books are dedicated to Biberman’s art, as is a feature length documentary, Brush with Life: The Art of Being Edward Biberman (2007).

Biberman’s art has undergone a resurgence of popularity during the past fifteen years with four solo or focused exhibitions, Edward Biberman Revisited (2009), Edward Biberman (2011-12), Lost Horizons: Mural Dreams of Edward Biberman (2014) and Edward Biberman, Abbot Kinney and the Story of Venice (2014), and representation in a number of other exhibitions, such as To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and other institutions (2011), Pacific Standard Time (2012), Contraption: Rediscovering California Jewish Artists (2018), Black American Portraits (2021) at LACMA, Alone Together: Encounters in American Realism (2022) at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art and Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Dijkstra Collection (2023 - 24) at the Crocker Art Museum, the Oceanside Museum of Art and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.

Biberman’s brand of modernism can be divided into four categories 1) Precisionist and Neo Immaculate urban scenes of New York and Southern California which celebrate the creations of humanity; 2) portraits which expose not only the historical context, but also the souls, of his subjects; 3) rural landscapes and still life paintings which portray the beauty of America and its flora; and 4) social realist works which explore the struggles, hopes and shortcomings of our society. Regardless of genre, Biberman had a unique sense of structure and color. His figures are at the same time specific and universal. Taken as a whole, Biberman’s body of work presents the viewer with a compelling and often daring vision of 20th century America and its art.