Winifred Lubell, political graphic artist and prolific children's book illustrator, died on January 2, 2012, at age 97.
Winifred Milius Lubell died on January 2, 2012, at her home, closing a career that spanned more than seventy years of political art, mural work, and illustration. She was 97 years old at the time of her death.
Obituaries in the Washington Post and Boston Globe remembered her as a versatile and socially engaged artist whose work moved fluidly between hard-hitting political graphics created for leftist and labor publications in the 1930s and 1940s, and the gentler, meticulously researched illustrations she produced for hundreds of children's books in the decades that followed, often in collaboration with her husband, writer Cecil Lubell.
Her later scholarly work, including the book The Metamorphosis of Baubo: Myths of Woman's Sexual Energy, reflected a deep engagement with feminist mythology and folk art traditions, revealing an artist who continued to explore new intellectual territory into her later decades. Her death marked the passing of one of the last surviving members of a generation of American artists shaped by the Depression-era political art movements and the mid-century boom in illustrated children's literature. Her papers and legacy are preserved in institutional archives, including the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art and Rutgers University Libraries, ensuring continued scholarly access to her body of work.