Bendiner, Alfred "Music to My Eyes"

Alfred Bendiner.  Music to My Eyes.  Philadelphia, 1952.  Cloth.  Out of print.  Inscribed copy to Mrs. John Y. Huber.  with original Bendiner watercolor laid in.  Fond and humorous caricatures of 20th century musical luminaries.

This book was inscribed to Mrs. John Y. Huber whose husband was President of the Keebler Biscuit Company.  

Alfred Bendiner (1899-1964) was a Philadelphia architect, caricaturist, and muralist, known for his wit and dry humor, and for the numerous sketches, drawings, and prints he made of scenes in Philadelphia, of his extensive world-wide travels, and of characters from the worlds of classical  music and theater.  His caricatures of musicians and theater personalities appeared regularly in the Philadelphia Record and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and grace the halls of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.  Bendiner attended the Philadelphia College of Art and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, for which he accompanied archeological expeditions to Iraq and Guatemala as artist-architect.  Bendiner was a member of the National Academy of Design and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

His work is in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, the Free Library of Philadelphia Print and Picture Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Gallery, as well as the Uffizi in Florence and the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris.  Bendiner  authored three books, which include the autobiographical work Translated From the Hungarian; Music to my Eyes, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952; and Bendiner’s Philadelphia, A. S. Barnes & Co., 1964.