Alfred Zwiebel
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Alfred Zwiebel (November 6, 1914 - February 25, 2005) was a landscape, floral, and still-life painter.
He was born in Fürth, in southern Germany, but when he was four years old, his family moved to the neighboring city of Bamberg, where he spent his childhood and youth. Bamberg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is famous for, among other things, its medieval cathedral and many other gems of art and architecture from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque and subsequent periods. The beauty of that city and its surroundings inspired the artist from his boyhood to the end of his life and constituted one of the dominant themes of his landscape paintings.
In 1935, Zwiebel emigrated to the United States, living first in Milwaukee and then settling in New York City. He became an American citizen in 1944, and for the next 20 years he worked at a variety of jobs until being able to dedicate himself fully to his art in the 1960s. In the ensuing decades, his work was shown in galleries and museums in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and California, as well as in Canada, England, Austria, and Germany. When a public art gallery was opened in the palace on Mainau Island, the site on Lake Constance (Bodensee) which attracts visitors from all over the world because of its spectacular gardens, Zwiebel was invited to give the inaugural exhibition. He was also invited by the city of Bamberg to give an exhibition as part of the city's 1,000-year anniversary celebration (1973), to take part in the exhibition marking the 975th anniversary of the Bamberg cathedral (1987), and to give a major retrospective exhibition in the city's Historical Museum (1993).
Zwiebel worked in oil, pastel and oil-pastel. He was particularly known for the brilliance of his palette -- what one art critic called "optimism expressed in color." In his flower paintings he did not just paint flowers as such, but transformed them into fantasies of light and color. Zwiebel loved the work of many artists and schools of painting, but felt the deepest affinity for the French Impressionists, by whom he was also most strongly influenced. When asked to which stylistic movement he felt he most belonged, he replied that he would call himself a "modern impressionist." Indeed, the Munich newspaper Die Abendzeitung wrote in 1968, "One could call Zwiebel a belated Pissarro, but with the caveat that he is a Pissarro for modern-day eyes."
Alfred Zwiebel died in New York City at the age of 90.
