David Freed
‘I feel I should tell you that I am not British but American. I am working as a research student at the Royal College and the length of my stay in England depends initially on finance. Right now I am on a Fulbright exchange grant.’
David Freed wrote two letters to Ruth Borchard; the first dated 'Feb.6, 1964', the second undated, from north London, In the first, he writes: 'I received your most kind letter and would ne most happy to sell you a self portrait (lithograph or engraving) for 5gns. However, I feel I should tell you that I am not British but American. I am working as a research student at the Royal College and the length of my stay in England depends initially on finance. Right now I am on a Fulbright exchange grant...' The second letter accompanied the unframed self-portrait in the post. In her notebook, Ruth has written by his name, '(USA) Yg C's '64, 5gns.' She had seen his self-portrait at the 'Young Contemporaries' show – of nationwide students' work – in London that year. In 2015 Freed recalled that he had 'informed her I was an American' to which she made no comment and still went ahead to acquire the self-portrait for her collection.
Born in 1936 in Toledo, Ohio, David Freed came to London in 1963 on a Fulbright Grant, studying print-making for a year at the Royal College of Art. The following year, he returned to United States to teach sculpture, design and children's classes at the Toledo Museum of Art School. In 1966 he moved to Richmond, Virginia. to start a printmaking course at Richmond Professional Institute, which later became Virginia Commonwealth University, where for many years he was Professor of Printmaking. Like his own mentor the print-maker Mauricio Lasansky, he has been, by all accounts, an inspirational teacher of print-making. He maintains his own studio in Richmond. Recollecting in 2001 his youthful contact with Ruth Borchard, he says he was inspired by her interest and enthusiasm, and the five guineas received made a helpful contribution to his income in London (which in 1964 amounted to twelve pounds a week).
At the bottom of the picture he has written in pencil: 'Self Portrait 2/8 David Freed'. Made in 1964, it shows the artist aged twenty-eight. The large, almond-shaped, dark eyes, heavily shadowed towards the bridge of the nose, and overcast by pronounced, arching eyebrows, convey the challenging air of a sulky young 'prophet' or bohemian intellectual rebel perhaps. The somewhat gaunt, bony face, slightly angled to the right, has strongly accentuated features: the prominent eyes, ears, nose and full, sensitive lips. The variegated use of line and tone throughout expresses quickness as well as fluidity and depth of thought. Subtle yet dynamic lines curl finely around the eyes, fall lightly on the temples. A dense network of bolder lines are richly enmeshed to describe the thick dark hair. Contrasting with the carved-out, velvety black backdrop - reminiscent in both terns of psychic and tonal qualities with that seen in some of Edvard Munch's self-portrait and portrait prints – the bulk of the slender, elongated, sinewy neck, the forehead, chin and left cheek, all skilfully conjured up mostly out of expanses of bare paper, appear luminous. The picture helps illustrate the poet Charles Wright's observation, 'There's a kind of mordant wit that informs all of Dave's work, a scintillation that often goes, and shouldn't, unnoticed.'
The picture's depth of feeling is reminiscent of European Expressionist portraits from, say, Kirchner to Kokoschka. While studying art at Miami University from 1954-58, Freed had encountered, and was highly impressed by an intaglio print by Mauricio Lasansky, who, born in Buenos Aires in 1909, had come to the United States in 1943. In New York Lasansky met and worked with a number of master print-makers, refugees from wartime Europe, and soon set up an important graphic workshop at the University of Iowa. Freed decided he must study under Lasansky – by then a famous artist – and so from 1959-61 was fortunate enough to be his pupil at the University of Iowa.
Lasansky died at his home in Iowa City in April 2012; in his Obituary in The New York Times (7th April, 2012), Margalit Fox described him as 'a wizard of printmaking technology... known for the grand scale of his images (some approach 4 feet by 8 feet), his vivid color and the complex layering of multiple techniques – including engraving, etching, drypoint, electric stippling and aquatint – in a single work.'
Interviewed in March 2001 for the catalogue for the exhibition 'David Freed, Printmaker: A Retrospective' (held at Virginia Commonwealth University, August 31st - October 28th 2001), Freed described the experience of studying in London in 1963-64:
It changed my life. When I got to London, I did little etchings that
were very similar to what I was doing in Iowa, only with London as
subject matter, rather than Iowa City. And when I left there, I was
doing things that were really different, and I was very influenced by
what they called the British pop movement, influenced, in particular
by an artist called Ron Kitaj [1932-2007]. Ron's work... opened up a
lot of things... that were in the back of my mind. He came from the
Midwest, too, incidentally. He now is, of course, very famous...
It was [then] very apparent that the British pop movement wasn't
like the American pop movement. The American pop movement was
really about pop culture. It was about Campbell's soup cans and stuff
like that. For some reason, I wasn't very interested in that. The
British pop movement combined imagery and concern with the
media with tacking it onto a tradition that came before it, and I
responded to that.
So it was very apparent that you could make art about contemporary
events that you saw in the newspapers, and some of my early
concerns in England started by virtually taking things out of the
tabloid press and making etchings. And that grew into other things. I
was in England in '63, the year that John Kennedy was assassinated.
To be an expatriate and have that happen was psychologically very
interesting. I was a big supporter of Kennedy... And he gets shot. I
think that was a terrible blow to everyone in my generation. And then
the Vietnam war started, and the civil rights movement and these...
were... having an effect on me and my art.
He evoked the atmosphere in London at that time:
... the year I went to London, it could not have been a better year to
go, because it was the year of the Beatles and the Albert Hall
Concert. I lived with some people, the Weinstein family... Manny
was a filmmaker, and he filmed the Beatles. He was the one who
told me, 'Go see these guys.'
I was a kinda mini-mini-mini-celebrity at the Royal College. I was
not really a celebrity, but I came from America.That was a big deal
to these English kids. I remember... everybody wanting to come to
America. The war was still talked about over there, and there were
these doldrums, and people were bored. It was dull, but I really kind
of found it interesting... I loved the reminiscing about the Second
World War. People still talked about rationing and so forth.
So, because I was this American, I used to get invited to places... my
wife ([Mary Lichtenwald, also from Toledo] and I were invited to
lunch at the Senior Common Room, Royal College of Art... the
Junior Common Room was like an army mess hall, and the Senior
Common Room was where they had silver, wine... We were a bit
late... And we walked in, and we're standing in a kind of vestibule to
what looked like a... very ritzy men's club. And there at the table was
Francis Bacon... (who) said, "Now that the children have arrived, we
can eat"... Hockney had just been in America and done these Rake's
Progress Prints, and he was floating in and out of the Royal College.
Peter Blake was around. And Bacon actually had a studio very close
to the Royal College
So began what his interviewer went on to call Freed's 'life-long exchange and interaction with England'. One of Freed's print-making pupils in Richmond, Virginia, whom he tutored 'in the fall of 1970', the artist Ann Chenoweth, recorded in his 2001 Retrospective catalogue, 'The happiest I ever saw him was in a pub in London, surrounded by his English printmaker friends. David had arranged for a group of us to study at the Central School of Art and Design, and he delighted in showing us the sights of his favourite city.'
Interviewing David Freed in 2015, Dr Robert Travers, Director of the Piano Nobile gallery, London, asked, 'You are on record as saying the year spent at the Royal College changed your life. What made you decide to come over to London?' The artist replied, 'I seemed to like a lot of English art. I saw some reproductions of [pictures by] Carel Weight [q.v.] who was Professor of Painting here... there were a lot of well known British artists around, like Ben Nicholson.
'I really did like English literature... and read people like D. H. Lawrence. Then my father taught me to read and he loved Charles Dickens, and I grew up with my father referring to somebody as that Uriah Heap or that person as Mr Micawber; he classified people as like Dickens characters...
'So I applied [to the Royal College]. There were one hundred people [Fulbright scholars] who came to England [that year]; there were two visual arts people .. a painter who went to the Slade, and me as a print-maker at the Royal College.
'William Blake's poetry I loved. When I studied print-making here, there was a big emphasis on Blake because he was a print-maker and a bookmaker and a poet.'
I first spoke to, and interviewed, David Freed in 2001, telephoning him (out of the blue, as far as he was concerned) from London to his print-making studio in Richmond, Virginia. Following the publication of the first edition of the Face to Face book in 2004, I had the good fortune to meet David on several occasions over the ensuing years on his visits to London, including at an Opening of an exhibition of Ruth Borchard's original Collection at the Kings Place Gallery, near King's Cross; he talked animatedly and at length to me (often while walking around the streets of Bloomsbury where he was then staying) about his first time as a student in London in 1963, and also about his own keen lifelong cultural and left-liberal-leaning political interests. I recall that he spent several absorbed mornings and afternoons on one visit making the most intricatelly atmospheric, mesmeric watercolours and gouaches of the ponds on Hampstead Heath. He generously gave me one of these pictures as a gift.
Writing about Freed's landscapes in 2005, Dr Howard Risatti, now emeritus professor of contemporary art and critical theory in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, noted: 'In the way Freed creates his landscapes, often layering materials through multiple print processes and direct mark making, he forces the thoughtful viewer to slow down, to linger over them in order to absorb their seasonal mood and atmosphere. At the same time, by making sure they don't reveal themselves too readily, too easily, his landscapes attain a depth of feeling that allows the world something of its full measure of complexity, beauty, and wonder.'
The 2001 retrospective catalogue shows four playful black-and-white photo-booth snapshots of Freed taken in 1963, the year before he made his self-portrait. Wearing a long, patterned scarf and beret, he looks humorously startled; then deadpan; then cross-eyed downbeat; then broadly smiling. His features as photographed are recognisably those in his lithograph, though a tad fuller-faced. As in his self-portrait, his dark eyes are mesmerising.
His 2001 retrospective catalogue shows two self-portraits. The back cover depicts a 1958 engraving showing Freed seated, pen and paper in hand, his body conjured up by muscularly terse lines, his dark-eyed countenance engaged in sharp, mournful-seeming self-assessment. The front cover depicts a 1989 etching, in which, against a black background, his wispy grey hair seems to explode outwards in strands of light like splashes of white paint, his huge glasses framing not only big, percipient, melancholy eyes but also deep pools or half-moons of white reflected light.
His 1960s intaglio prints provocatively utilise contemporary imagery – newspaper cuttings with references to boxing matches, Vietnam, American patriotism and Che Guevara – in a subtly allusive, lyrical manner. Many of his prints can be described as evocations of external weather as well as ever-fluctuating, enigmatic inner atmospheres. These range from a 1962 etching of enchanted skaters on a lake to a 1990 intaglio and colour relief series evoking a synaesthetic impression of Backyard Night Soundsreverberating over shimmering neighbourhood waters. The poet Charles Wright has written: 'There is a modesty in Freed's work – not of ambition but of presentation – that is like the spread of light in certain Renaissance paintings. One doesn't know where it come from, but it is everywhere, enlightening, leaving us, somehow, more room to look in, a seduction of sorts that eschews excess.'
In the 1980s and 90s, he illustrated (in limited print editions) poems by leading modern American poets Charles Wright (b.1935), Philip Levine (1928-2015) and Larry Levis (1946-1996) among others. Marrying text to image with rare sensitivity, these poetic prints achieve intricate, coruscating, multi-layered effects of painterly beauty. In 1996, Freed wrote that during Larry Levine's 'brief time in Richmond, I spent time with him. I did several portraits of him because he was quite interesting to watch with his profuse, loose gestures and double jointedness. We collaborated, thanks to a Virginia Commonwealth University faculty research grant, on two works: a broadside with his "The Two Trees," and a book with... two etchings, the drawings for which are included here, and his poem "Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage."
'Several years ago, we spent the day in the National Gallery. I took him especially to see the Rembrandts. Looking at the truly great, late self-portrait, Larry remarked, "The eyes remind me of Phil," of his beloved teacher Philip Levine.
'What a wonderful comment from a true open heart.'
In 2012, Freed published a booklet, David Freed Self Portraits, illustrating twenty-six self-portraits he has made over many years. In a short Introduction he wrote:
Some say all art is self portrait.
My earliest memory of making a picture (Crayola) was a self
portrait. The second grade teacher posted it in the classroom
and I had my first taste of fame.
The first four images in the book are from my... twenties [the
third of which is his 1963 self-portrait.]
Self portrait has continued to be convenient subject matter.
The first of these self-portraits is a watercolour from 1957-58, a skilful chiaroscuro study of a serious-looking young man with the short back and sides of the period yet also with the sensitive, sensuous mien of a contemporaneous Keith Vaughan study of a youth. Freed's 1995 charcoal, pastel and watercolour self-portrait – a dispassionate, informal view of the artist in the act of creation – shows the artist in profile, his thick, dishevelled gray hair flowing from under a baseball cap, seen focussing through thick-rimmed glasses as he draws and paints on a board or piece of paper suspended in front of him. A 2001 etching also of the artist in downward glancing profile is a consummate study of pensive introspection in a subtle variety of dark and lights. A series of self-portrayals in multi-media (one is described as 'etching, monotype, watercolor, pastel') from 2012 show the artist in what he calls, in each case, a Strange Season (one in which he is depicted in short sleeves against a glowing roseate backdrop, a work denoted Summer; another, in which he appears no less at ease, with his hands warming up in his coat pockets, against a bare backdrop, a work denoted Winter). In each of these, he appears as a quite quotidian though sage-like figure, at once quite distinctly rendered yet also somehow evoked as a remote, quiveringly elusive presence. Dr Howard Risatti's observation about Freed's portraiture is pertinent here: 'Always the image remains a little unsettled so that it hovers in a zone somewhere between simple marks on paper and complete illusionism.'
His 2004 relief etching Beside the River (2004) shows the artist as a keenly contoured yet still elusory presence – a Whitmanesque 'loafing' figure in Stetson-like hat, dark shirt, pale casual jacket and shorts, standing, hands in pockets, silhouetted against a blank sky and subtle patterns of light brown rippling and swirling waters. His countenance is heavily shadowed yet the viewer can just about discern his bare features and a singular lock of white hair falling from beneath his hat above his left ear.
A 2010 self-portrait in etching, pastel and watercolour, entitled 75 (inscribed boldly as such at bottom right) shows the artist's head, expressively elongated and distended in form, topped with thick white hair, resting in an emphatically long, slender right hand. The subject's acerbic, quizzical expression here, as he is seen no doubt to reflect on the number of years now attained, is heightened further by the way his wistful eyes are amplified through the exaggerated pools of his spectacle lenses.
In Here and Three (2011; etching, pastel and watercolour), the artist's somewhat unexpectedly rotund-looking figure (he has always appeared quite lean in person) with an animated, enigmatic mien, appears as much an evanescent component of the larger landscape (both ecstatically suffused with pink and gold) as the filigree of bare branches on the wintry tree to the right. In such works, the artist's focus on minutiae of landscape and the 'mordant wit' and edgy composure of his intimate self-portrayals become movingly and scintillatingly one.
