The world of painter George Biddle is on view at Woodmere, along with promises of a future exhibit featuring his ‘lost’ Nuremberg drawings

George Biddle loved the road.

For one thing, it could get him far away from Philadelphia and an elitist society that he found fussy and stifling. Still, he would gossip about it with Mary Cassatt while they enjoyed tea and the Philadelphia white cakes she liked to serve him during his visits to her summer château outside of Paris.

Cassatt, another artistic refugee from the Main Line, would give the young artist tips about printmaking, Impressionism, and career building, introducing him to Monet and Renoir and other notables from the French art world.

On other trips, the restless Biddle would entertain his pal Diego Rivera with Philadelphia stories as they traveled around Mexico, talking politics and revolution and sketching farm laborers, street scenes, and animals in the fields.

The Biddle family may have been integral to the nation’s elite through the centuries, and artist George Biddle may have been a graduate of Groton School and Harvard Law, and good friends with the Roosevelts, but that tells only half of his story. The other half embraces social justice and the plain people of the nation; his art was closely aligned with the social realism of Mexican muralists.

Woodmere Art Museum has mounted what is thought to be the first museum exhibition of Biddle’s work — “George Biddle: The Art of American Social Conscience,” on view through Jan. 22 — a startling revelation of an artist who was well-known in the 1930s and 1940s but has since seen a decline in reputation in an art world dominated by abstract expressionism and conceptualism.

But now, in addition to the major retrospective, William Valerio, Woodmere director and CEO, says the museum has found a cache of drawings the artist made in 1946 on assignment to cover the Nuremberg trials for Look magazine. Together with other “lost” drawings Biddle made of war-torn Italy, the Woodmere director, who also curated the Biddle show, wants to put together an exhibition of the newly rediscovered work and send it to Germany and Italy, and on to Israel.

Valerio described the drawings of defeated antisemites and fascists in the dock as having “global importance” and direct relevance to the United States today. He came upon them shortly before the current Biddle show opened, so only a handful of the drawings are on display.

The drawings were found as Valerio poked through Biddle’s old studio in the house the artist built in Croton-on-Hudson, north of New York City. Michael Biddle, 88, also an artist, lives in the house and has preserved his father’s studio and a great deal of his artwork. (George Biddle died in 1973.)

Valerio was stunned by the discovery.

“What I found was a portfolio of drawings that said, ‘Tunisia, Italy, Nuremberg,’ and I said, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ “ Valerio recalled. “All of these drawings are just kind of stuffed into this portfolio. I don’t know if anybody’s even looked at them in decades and decades.”

On a recent visit to the exhibition, Michael Biddle and his wife, sculptor Elizabeth Surbeck Biddle, looked carefully at the few Nuremberg drawings that made it in time for the exhibition.

“My father was overseas for, what, eight months, or something like that,” Michael Biddle said, describing the artist’s assignment to Nuremberg. “My mother and I were alone and she worried about him a great deal.”

Biddle said he certainly knew of the Nuremberg drawings, although “not in as much detail” as accompanies the Woodmere exhibit. He said his father must have spoken “a lot” about the Nuremberg experience when he returned from Europe. George Biddle’s brother, Francis Biddle, attorney general under Franklin Roosevelt, was named a judge at Nuremberg. Both brothers were, therefore, participants in the great trial.

The Look drawings were accompanied by George Biddle’s unsparing written descriptions of the Nazis in the dock. Hermann Goering, for instance, whom Biddle identifies as “ex-Reichsmarshal,” is “aggressive, pink-cheeked, clear-eyed.”

“A bull of a man, he has meaty, sensual hands — but the small, tight, thin-lipped cruel mouth of an old eunuch. How can one reconcile the jovial warm earthy extrovert Goering seems to be with the cold, crafty pig eyes and the shrunken mouth of a charwoman?”

This scathing description accompanies an equally savage drawing that emphasizes Goering’s bulbous butcher’s hands on which the ex-Reichsmarshal rests his squash-like, pulpy head. Another drawing shows a bulky, sack-like Goering seated next to a pinched, shriveled Rudolf Hess.

Hess is pinned, wiggling, by Biddle’s prose. “His face is subhuman,” Biddle wrote. “It has the expressionless, nervous, vacant stare of a caged ape. The pale, ape-eyes are staring — at what? I look into his eyes. There is no contact, no hate, intelligence or fear. One feels that he should be belted about the loins and chained to a hurdy-gurdy.”

(All the Nuremberg drawings are part of a major gift to Woodmere from Michael and Elizabeth Biddle, including eight paintings, two sculptures, 28 prints, and 182 drawings.)

That his father was so unsparingly antifascist is not a surprise to Michael Biddle.

“I think of the 1920s as being a very rebellious period of people wanting to overthrow social norms and escape to Bohemia,” Biddle said, looking at an extraordinary print his father made evoking Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists who became a political cause célèbre in the 1920s before their execution. “A lot of social roles were rethought, weren’t they? I mean, a lot of people rebelled against their backgrounds. And so in a sense, I think he was probably part of a movement.”

“I think he probably identified a lot with, for want of another expression, the common man,” Biddle continued. “And I don’t know if I could tell you exactly why. I’m not gonna try to psychoanalyze him, but I wonder if part of it was because my father had studied law at a certain point. You know, his brother, of course was a lawyer, and maybe the sense of social injustice was seen through the lens of law to some extent.”

Biddle’s focus on what his son calls social injustice was strong, but it wasn’t ideological. His lively use of color clearly shows the influence of his stays in France. And the exhibition illustrates the wide range of subjects that captured his fancy. Yes, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Dust Bowl, but also animals of all kinds, landscapes, fanciful allegories, and above all, portraits of people. The exhibition is filled with prints and drawings, paintings, ceramics, books.

Biddle was also a committed muralist and with his wife, the sculptor Hélène Sardeau, created public murals in Mexico and Brazil. Biddle’s murals can also be seen at the Justice Department building in Washington, and Sardeau’s first public sculpture, The Slave, can be seen as part of the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial on the bank of the Schuylkill, just off Kelly Drive.

The Woodmere exhibition also contains several examples of her work.

Considering the seeming dichotomy of the Biddle of Privilege and the Biddle of Social Justice, Valerio believes the key can be found in the artist’s experience of war.

“In World War I, the job that he’s given in the trenches is interrogating captured German prisoners from no-man’s-land, interrogating them and then relaying their dying words as they relate to tactics and strategy, back to France headquarters, and it’s harrowing, life-changing.”

It gives him “a deep, deep abhorrence of authoritarianism in all of its forms,” said Valerio.

The traveling exhibition of Nuremberg and war images is in the early planning stages; it is perhaps two or three years down the road, he said.

“George Biddle: The Art of American Social Conscience” is on view at Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Ave., Phila., until Jan. 22, 2023. https://woodmereartmuseum.org/