Jules Halfant

Who is Jules Halfant?

Jules Halfant is an American painter and printmaker. He is notable as a Federal Art Project artist during the Great Depression of the 1930s in both mural and easel categories of the New York Works Progress Administration. While in the WPA, he worked alongside such well-known 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 other musicians.

While attending high school in Brooklyn, New York with Jacob Kainen, Jules submitted his drawings to the National Academy of Design in New York at age of fourteen. He was accepted 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 artist started to focus on painting Jewish religious and cultural life.