Scope and Content Note
The papers of George Biddle (1885-1973) include material dated between 1863 and 1973, with the greater part dated after 1916. Included in the collection are diaries, general and family correspondence, drafts and printed copies of speeches, articles and a memoir, sketchbooks, and scrapbooks of personal clippings, announcements of exhibits, and reviews of Biddle's books. The family correspondence contains a number of letters received by Biddle's wife, the sculptor Hélène Sardeau Biddle. Material relating to Hélène Sardeau can also be found in the Subject File and Scrapbook series. An Addition to the collection contains diaries, correspondence, and a sketchbook which supplement material in the original series. The papers are organized in nine series: Diaries , Family Correspondence , General Correspondence , Writings , Subject File , Sketches and Sketchbooks , Scrapbooks , Addition , and Oversize .
The principal topic documented by the collection is George Biddle's career as a painter and as a spokesman for a more prominent role by the federal government in support of art. Biddle's association with the Federal Art Project, including his commission to paint murals for the Department of Justice building in 1935, is documented in the Diaries , General Correspondence , Subject File , and Scrapbooks series. In 1942, he and his wife, Hélène Sardeau, were commissioned by the government of Brazil to create murals and sculpture for the national library in Rio de Janeiro. In 1943-1944, he and Sardeau designed and painted the murals for the Mexican supreme court building. These projects are documented in the Diaries , General Correspondence , Subject File , Scrapbooks , and Addition series.
Biddle helped organize the War Department Art Committee in 1943 and traveled as artist-correspondent at the battle fronts in North Africa and Italy. That same year he began planning the reorganization of postwar federal art projects. In 1945 he covered the Nuremberg War Crime Trials as reporter and artist. His wartime activities are documented in the Diaries , General Correspondence , Subject File , Scrapbooks , and Addition series.
George Biddle was a writer as well as a painter. He published books and articles about his own development as an artist, most of which recount his travels throughout the world. Only his 1939 memoir, An American Artist's Story, is represented in the Writings series, along with a number of articles and speeches about art. Biddle's diaries , beginning in 1901, cover most of his life except for the years 1910-1917 and 1924-1932. For the remaining years, Biddle created a detailed record of his activities, encounters, reading, thoughts, conversations, and impressions. He recorded the routine matters of daily life but also described artists and writers of his wide acquaintance, and the social and political leaders he knew from boyhood and from his association with the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
Edited extracts from Biddle's diaries appear in his books An American Artist's Story (1939), Artist at War (1944), and Tahitian Journal (1968), but most of the diaries were never published. Of particular interest are the entries describing the Nuremberg trials. As a brother of Francis Biddle, Franklin D. Roosevelt's attorney general, George Biddle was a close associate of the American team of prosecutors. His conversations with them and descriptions of the area devastated by war are recorded in diaries in the Addition series.
The Addition series also includes family and general correspondence and a sketchbook. The material is organized in accordance with the arrangement of the preceding series.
Posters from the Japanese exhibition can be found in the Oversize series.
Correspondents in the collection include Conrad Aiken, Bernard Berenson, Thomas Hart Benton, Francis and Katherine Biddle, Van Wyck Brooks, William C. Bullitt, Mary Cassatt, John Cheever, Adolf Dehn, Wilhelm Hunt Diederich, William O. Douglas, George Grosz, Aldous Huxley, William James, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse), Walter Lippmann, Thomas Mann, Norman Mailer, Lewis Mumford, Isamu Noguchi, José Clemente Orozco, Henry Varnum Poor, Ezra Pound, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Santayana, Ben Shahn, John Steinbeck, Allen Tate, Harry S. Truman, John Hall Wheelock, Edmund Wilson, Owen Wister, Grant Wood, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andrew Wyeth, and William and Marguerite Zorach. Some of the correspondence is in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.