George Biddle (January 24, 1885 – November 6, 1973) was an American painter, muralist and lithographer, best known for his social realism and combat art.
A childhood friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he played a major role in establishing the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), which employed artists under the Works Progress Administration.
Returning to Europe in 1914, Biddle spent time in Munich and Madrid, studying printmaking in the Spanish capital, before trying his hand at impressionism in France.
In the early interwar period Biddle continued his studies in far-flung locations such as Tahiti, returned to France in 1924, and in 1928 went on a sketching trip through Mexico with Diego Rivera.
Biddle himself completed a mural titled The Tenement for the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C., and made sketches of the opera Porgy and Bess during its late 1930s tour.
Biddle was hired in 1940, along with eight other prominent American artists, to document dramatic scenes and characters during the production of the film The Long Voyage Home, a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays.
Biddle himself traveled through Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy with the 3rd Infantry Division and produced works documenting that unit's activities.
Another factor that contributed to Biddle's artwork were his friendships with many great "painters, sculptors, and critics of the past generation and his life-long activity in behalf of fellow artists".
[2] Biddle put in his "personal feelings—affection, humor, compassion, irony, social outrage—as well as his technical mastery of the lithographic medium" to "enliven his work".
"Rejecting the stale formulas of academism and critical of what he saw as a loss of articulate emotional expressionism in much of modernist art, Biddle grappled with his own artistic identity throughout his life".