Pallant House Gallery has a reputation for rediscovering and reinstating artistic titans from the past, and in its spectacular exhibition on Barnett Freedman (1901–58) it has once again surpassed itself.
Freedman, barely known today, was a famous illustrator and artist in his time. He started off attending night classes at St Martin’s School of Art, and in due course began work as a junior draftsman to a mason. In 1916 he went to work for an architect, where his main employment was lettering the long lists of the dead for war memorials.
He managed to get a scholarship to the Royal College of Art with the help of its Principal, William Rothenstein. The rigor, width, and breadth of this education at the rca set him on his path for life. He was tutored on geometric principles, on perspective and anatomy, on lettering, on the grammar of design; he submitted daily exercises in drawing antique casts; he learned life-drawing in chalk and charcoal.
Freedman painted in oil and gouache, and made pen-and-ink watercolors, but it is in lithography that he excelled; here his originality and force, and his ability to create sensitive images, are at their most striking. His rca training gave him the confidence to break rules and create radical work. He believed in the credo “art for all”—a socially committed and widely understandable art in the face of the increasing dominance of elitist forms of abstraction.
The Pallant House exhibition is in no