Jack Bilbo (born Hugo Cyril Kulp Baruch, 13 April 1907 –19 December 1967) was a German writer, art gallery owner, and self-taught painter.
Life
Bilbo was born in Berlin, Germany in 1907. His parents owned a theatrical supply company.
After the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in N ...
came to power he fled to France, Spain, and finally to England.
In 1941, Bilbo opened ''The Modern Art Gallery'' in London, exhibiting the work of
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.
Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, Constructivism (art), constructivism, surrealism ...
,
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
, and his own paintings and drawings, as well as the work of many unknown artists.
Bilbo moved to
Weybridge, England after the war ended and created large figurative sculptures in cement in his home's garden. They were entitled, ''Life'', ''Devotion'', and ''Sanctuary'',
and were destroyed when he left England in the early 1950s, moving to France with his wife Owo.
[
In 1948, he published ''Jack Bilbo: an Autobiography''. The book is subtitled "The first forty years of the complete and intimate life-story of an Artist, Author, Sculptor, Art Dealer, Philosopher, Psychologist, Traveller and a Modernist Fighter for Humanity". In the same year he also closed the gallery.][
]
Painting style
In a 2014 review, art critic Gabriel Coxhead wrote that Bilbo's
drawings and paintings are technically naive and clunky, with the sort of straight-on or sideways views, segmented bodies and scribbled-in backgrounds you tend to see in children’s art. There’s something childlike, too, in the feeling of inventiveness and unselfconsciousness, with scenes that feature fantastic amalgams of monsters, robots, and other magical elements. Yet for all that, there’s also a sense of sophistication, as well as carnivalesque and absurdist humour – from in-jokes about cubism to his fetishistic obsession with women’s buttocks, which become weirdly transformed into all sorts of freaky faces and patterns.
Exhibitions
* 1947 The Modern Art Gallery
* 1947 Museum of Modern Art, Weybridge, England
Bibliography
* Bilbo, Jack (1932). ''Carrying a Gun for Al Capone''. London & New York: Putnam
* Bilbo, Jack (1937). ''I Can't Escape Adventure''. Cresset Press
* Bilbo, Jack (1946)). ''Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen''. London: The Modern Art Gallery
* Bilbo, Jack (1945). ''Pablo Picasso. Thirty Important Paintings from 1904 to 1943''. London: The Modern Art Gallery
* Bilbo, Jack (1945). ''The Moderns''. London: The Modern Art Gallery
* Bilbo, Jack (1946). ''Out of My Mind''. London: The Modern Art Gallery
* Bilbo, Jack (1946). ''Famous Nudes by Famous Artists''. London: The Modern Art Gallery
* Bilbo, Jack (1946). ''No Heaven - No Hell Human Conclusions''. London: The Modern Art Gallery
* Bilbo, Jack (1948). ''Jack Bilbo: An Autobiography''. London: The Modern Art Gallery
See also
* Henry Stockley
Henry "Busdriver" Stockley (1892 – 1982) was an English primitive artist. Once called "the greatest inspired painter since William Blake", Henry Stockley was arguably the most important primitive artists active in the period 1930 to 1960. A ...
References
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External links
* British Pathé video film archiv
''Jack Bilbo Sculptor 1947''
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* September 4 - 3 October 2014 London exhibition
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bilbo, Jack
1907 births
1967 deaths
20th-century German painters
20th-century German male artists
German male painters
20th-century German male writers