Another Biddle, Another Show

Attorney General Francis Biddle helped produce the picture of the decade--two U.S. soldiers carrying Montgomery Ward's Board Chairman Sewell Avery out of his own office. Three days later, Brother George Biddle, war correspondent and LIFE artist, opened a less sensational exhibit of war drawings and a roomful of prewar oils at Manhattan's Associated American Artists Galleries.

George Biddle's 45 war pictures were pen drawings of U.S. soldiers in Africa and Italy. His 34 prewar oils were landscapes of California, Texas, Brazil, some still lifes, several portraits. One large canvas pictured a monumental, seated Frieda Lawrence (widow of late great Brit ish Novelist D. H. Lawrence), her chill eyes peering from a heavy face, fringes of her shawl spilling like black blood from her lap.

Biddle war pictures depicted anonymous G.I. faces, habits, miseries, elations, fatigues. There were exhausted Italian ref ugees, U.S. wounded, panoramic views of battlefields, pen & ink portraits of Generals Eisenhower and Clark, Correspondent Ernie Pyle. There were also nine sketches of dead bodies. One of the most effective, War Drawing No. u, showed a death-sprawled German infantryman, his mouth covered with a muffler, his unflung hand grenade lying near his outflung hand.

Very much alive at his exhibit was Artist Biddle, who, like his lawyer brother, is bony, fidgety and gimlet-eyed. Said he: "Ninety-nine percent of our frontline men will shoot on sight any Congressman who interferes with soldier votes, or annihilate all war-plant strike fomenters--and that means the [Montgomery Ward] Averys."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.