Edward Biberman

Edward Biberman was an economics graduate of the University of Pennsylvania when he decided to pursue an art career and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He then spent three years touring and painting in Europe. Upon return to the United States, he spent several years working as a portrait artist in New York City and was selected as one of the forty-six young emerging artists by the new Museum of Modern Art. He visited the Southwest in the early 1930s and moved to Los Angeles in 1936. He taught at the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena from 1938 to 1950 and lectured at various campuses of the University of California and at Loyola Marymount University. During the 1930s and 40s Biberman worked in a Social Realist style, depicting the poignancy of the human condition. He completed murals at the Los Angeles Federal Building, 1936, and the U.S. Post Office in Venice, 1941. In these he was influenced by the work of Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. Later in his career he began painting hard-edge, geometric abstractions depicting Los Angeles area architecture and freeways. In 1971 the artist said that he had four main areas of interest: the earth and its visual riches, the people upon it, the forms and structures they have added to it, and man’s relation to his fellows, in turn tragic and heroic.