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| Arnold Friedman |
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| American, 1874-1946 |
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| “Mother and Child” |
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| Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower right, 1923 25 x 18 Framed: 32 1/2 x 25 1/4 inches |
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| Provenance: Private Collection, Ontario, Canada Arnold Friedman was a painter, illustrator and author. Born in New York City, he studied at the New York School of Art with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. In 1909 he went to Paris for six months and experimented with the pointillist technique he found in the work of Camille Pissarro. Friedman lived in Corona, Queens and worked as a post office clerk for some forty years. Under the auspices of the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, Friedman painted murals for Chalfonte-Haddon Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey and post office buildings in Orange, Virginia; Kingstree, South Carolina; and Warrenton, Georgia. Friedman's style underwent several transformations during his lifetime. He began his career under the tutelage of Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League in New York. These painters certainly had an influence on his early style, which was quite realistic and representational. In 1909 Friedman took a six-month leave of absence from his job at the Post Office to study art in Paris. He was most impressed by the paintings of Pissarro, and other impressionist and post impressionist painters. He also experimented with cubism for a brief period. From these influences Friedman chartered his own course and created a unique approach to painting. Throughout his artistic career, Friedman was drawn to portraying the traditional subjects of landscape, portraiture, figurative painting, and still life. However, as Hilton Kramer has observed, his "handling of them was anything but conventional. He had a way of developing these subjects into something unexpected, of taking them beyond what tradition has decreed they should be. It is this quality of beyondness, as we might call it, that Friedman's originality is so often to be found."1 In the present painting Friedman turned to the time honored genre of mother and child imagery and reinterpreted it through a modernist lens. In doing so, he was drawing upon the pervasive revival of classicism that followed World War I. Friedman was but one of many artists to find solace in neoclassical subjects and themes at this time. He tempered his modernist impulses through the aesthetics of the past and thus followed a path taken by countless individuals who sought to recapture the civility and conceits of high culture and tradition. Many artists in the 1920s found an antidote to the devastating effects of industrialization and materialism in the classical tradition, which had become synonymous with notions of tranquility and order. Accordingly, they responded to their world by idealizing the present through the filter of past subject matter and styles. It is in this context that one must understand Friedman's Mother and Child, a touching work where the modern and ancient are intertwined into a singular poetic statement. Mother and Child appears to have been exhibited in March of 1923 in a group exhibition at The New Gallery in New York. Friedman presented his work in this show along with paintings by Ernest Fiene, Leon Hartl, Joseph Stella and Carl Sprinchorn. He participated in many of the progressive art exhibits of the day, including the Society of Independent Artists, the Salons of America, and in exhibitions held at the Anderson Galleries, all of which were in New York. Exhibited New Pictures and The New Gallery. March 5-31, 1923, The New Gallery, New York |
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