Jules Halfant

Jules Halfant (June 23, 1909 in New York City, New York – May 5, 2001 in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey) was an American painter and printmaker. He is notable as a Federal Art Project (FAP) artist during the Great Depression of the 1930s in both mural and easel categories of the New York Works Progress Administration (WPA). While in the WPA, he worked to the side of such renowned artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery and Stuart Davis. From 1953 to 1988 Jules Halfant was Art Director of Vanguard Records where he designed albums featuring Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Country Joe and the Fish, Buffy Sainte-Marie and many supplementary musicians.

While attending high school in Brooklyn, New York in the same way as Jacob Kainen, Jules submitted his drawings to the National Academy of Design in New York at age of fourteen. He was fashionable as a student and studied there in 1924-1927. During the 1930s and 1940s, Jules Halfant created hundreds of paintings depicting street scenes of New York City. He provided the illustrations for Jazz, A People's Music, a 1948 study by Marxist art critic Sidney Finkelstein. Halfant painted his neighbors, parents, friends, shopkeepers, pushcart vendors. Beginning in the 1950s, the performer started to focus upon painting Jewish religious and cultural life. He got inspiration from works of good Jewish authors (Dybbuk by S. Ansky, Tevye by Sholem Aleichem, Three Wishes by I. L. Peretz), Biblical stories as capably from visiting synagogues where he depicted rotate aspects of the services and holidays observances. In 1963, Jules Halfant expected the Bob Dylan New York City Town Hall Concert poster.

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Discography (Visual)