Alfred Zwiebel

In 1993, the Bamberg Historical Museum (Historisches Museum Bamberg), which also owns two of his works, gave a major retrospective exhibition of his work. Other selected exhibitions include:

When in 1977 Countess and Count Lennart Bernadotte opened a public art gallery in their castle on Mainau Island, a popular tourist site on Lake Constance (Bodensee) 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 1,000th-anniversary celebration in 1973 and to take part in the special exhibition marking the 975th anniversary of the Bamberg Cathedral in 1987. Two of his works are represented in the catalog of that exhibition, "Symbol-Object-Motif: The Bamberg Cathedral and its Representation in Painting, Graphics and Other Art Forms from the Middle Ages to the Present."

By the 1960s, he was able to devote himself to painting full-time. In the ensuing decades, his work was shown in galleries and museums across the United States, and in England, Austria and his native Germany, where he achieved particular critical acclaim. (Excerpts from some reviews are included below.)

For the next 20 years he worked at a variety of "day jobs," painting whenever he had free time. Among other things, he worked as a baker, ski salesman, and commercial artist. From 1949-1953, he was a radio personality in New York City, where he had a weekly program, "Music From Alfred Zwiebel's Collection," on station WABF, playing opera and classical music recordings from his own extensive collection (opera was another of his lifelong passions). He also occasionally wrote articles on music for publication. Two singers engaged at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1950s and '60s, Lisa Della Casa and Anneliese Rothenberger, studied painting with him while in New York.,

Soon after the Nazis came to power, Zwiebel and his family left Germany; he and his four siblings were raised as Lutherans by their mother, but his father was Jewish, as well as politically active against the Nazis. In 1935, Zwiebel immigrated to the United States, living first in Milwaukee and then settling in New York City, where in 1941 he married Clara Fried, a portrait painter who had studied with American Realist artist Tully Filmus. They had one child, a daughter. Zwiebel served in the U.S. Army during World War II and became an American citizen in 1944.

Alfred Zwiebel (November 6, 1914 — February 25, 2005) was a German-American landscape, floral, and still-life painter.