Gifted, highly original painter Arnold Friedman charted his own unique course in early twentieth-century modernism. Friedman was born to Hungarian Jewish parents in Corona, Queens, where he worked as a post office clerk for more than forty years, painting on evenings and weekends. He would only devote himself to full-time painting after he retired at age 59 in 1933. 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 career. He began working as a fine artist in 1905 under the tutelage of Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League in New York. These painters had an important influence on his early style, which was geared towards representational subjects. However, during his studies at the Art Students League, Friedman found himself a misfit as an older postal clerk, and harnessed the belief that “every painter must learn his own trade.”
In 1909, Friedman took a six-month leave of absence from his job to study art in Paris. During this time, he was exposed to the virtues of Impressionism. He was most influenced by the Pointillism of Camille Pisarro, and his admiration of other Impressionists and Post-Impressionists was reflected in his own art after his return to New York. Friedman’s trip to France also introduced him to Cubism, which he went on to experiment with for a brief period. Drawing extensively from these European influences, Friedman developed his own style and created a unique approach to painting.
Upon his return to New York, Friedman employed cool tonalities and smooth finishes; he generally painted traditional subjects of landscapes, portraits, and nudes all expressing his deep commitment to color. Friedman also worked in a Synchromist-inspired idiom at this time, exploring color contrasts through abstracted planes. In the 1910s and 1920s, he exhibited with many of the most avant-garde venues and dealers of the period, including the Montross Galleries, the Society of Independent Artists, and Bourgeois Galleries.
Later in his career, Friedman devoted himself to working from nature in an abstracted style, abandoning the brush for a palette knife. This method of painting allowed for powerful effects of texture and abbreviated forms. His style during his later career is distinct, as Friedman painted with scumbled surfaces that create contours and texture to define characteristics of his subjects, typically landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, still lifes, and portraits. Throughout his career, he received attention from the most influential critics of his era; these reviews generally praised Friedman’s individuality. In 1945 Clement Greenberg described a group of paintings that “established him as one of the strongest and most original landscapists we have.” Greenberg went on to observe, “His originality is the expression of a pure, honest, serious, and independent personality rather than of a method.”(1)
Until his death in his seventies, Friedman was actively painting and developing his unique style. His oeuvre appears to have been limited to approximately 300 works.
Friedman’s work is represented in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Newark Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He was also a member of the Society of Independent Artists and the Salons of America.
1. Clement Greenberg, “Art,” The Nation, 133 (March 17, 1945), 314.
