George Biddle - Style and Influences

Style and Influences

Some factors that contributed to Biddle’s artwork are the many art movements that he was involved in. Biddle was involved in “French Impressionism; the American Ashcan School; the School of Paris and Cubism during those early and exciting days when it first exploded on the world; Regionalism, the Mexican Mural Movement, and the New Deal Subsidy of Art”. He also was involved in the “post war currents of contemporary art”. Many of his works of art were contemporary. 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”. He borrowed many of the other artists' styles and turned them into his own by using different techniques and images to get a different effect. Biddle believed that everyone’s life should be influenced by every “fact with which one comes in contact, until one ceases to grow or is, actually dead”. This is the reason why Biddle became such a successful American artist; he had his own style, and expressed real actual events.

A further influence on Biddle was Mary Cassatt. Biddle met Cassatt at the Académie Julian in Paris; she too was from Philadelphia. Cassatt helped to cultivate in Biddle an appreciation of the work of Degas. Some of Biddle’s prints reflected “the style of these two artists in their intimate, domestic subject matter”.

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”.