Harold Freedman

Australian War Artist Harold Freedman (left) in Collins Street Melbourne with his brother. Courtesy Australian War Memorial Harold Emanuel Freedman O.A.M. (21 May 191516 July 1999) was an artist from Victoria, Australia, renowned as an illustrator and lithographer, as an official war artist, and for his work in public murals.

Early life Harold Freedman's father Julius was born in Bristol, England, and migrated with his parents at four years old to Australia where they lived in Carlton. There Harold Freeman's grandfather started a small picture-frame factory. Julius married Miriam (née Hyams) and Harold was born in Ewart St., Malvern on 21 May 1915.

Training Harold Freedman studied at Caulfield Technical College and took extra tuition from Napier Waller, then furthered his education at the Melbourne Technical College from 1929 to 1935. In 1936 he worked as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for Melbourne weeklies; His ink cartoon Calvalcade of Billy 1940, is in the State Library of Victoria, donated by the artist.

War artist

During World War II, Freedman enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, becoming a war artist attached to the Royal Australian Air Force Historical War Records Section, along with Ivor Hele, Eric Thake and Max Newton. He attained the rank of flight lieutenant. He was able to work as a war artist in 1944 and 1945, in Borneo, Noemfoor and around Australia. His work also featured on magazine covers like New Idea magazine in the 1940s.

Post-war In 1954, while living in Boronia, he was commissioned to produce a painting of the coat of arms of Victoria as the backdrop for the state dinner with Queen Elizabeth II on her visit to Australia.

In his role from 1972 to 1983 as the state artist of Victoria he created a number of wall murals and floor mosaics in public buildings. Many are of massive scale; his History of Military Aviation mural at the War Memorial in Canberra is 60 × 4.5 m; the History of Transport in Australia mural at Southern Cross station (then Spencer St. railway station) was 36 × 7.3 m, and one, a mosaic covering an external wall of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in Melbourne is 25 m in height. He and his assistants, artists Joe Attard and David Jack, aided by calligraphist Bruce Walker, commenced The History of Racing in 1984, a series of seven 10 × 6 m murals, completed in time for the Australian Bicentenary.

When Spencer Street Station underwent radical redevelopment (2002–2006) and was renamed Southern Cross, Freedman's History of Transport in Australia above the passenger waiting hall was removed, but due to bargaining by the CFMEU, The participants, whom he actively recruited and who included Harry Rosengrave, Fred Williams, Charles Blackman, Tate Adams, Barbara Brash, Ian Armstrong, Kenneth Jack, and Leonard French, joined his informally named Melbourne Print Group for which he "acquired" supplies that they were free to use, such as lithography stones, metal plates and ink.

Freedman conducted The Art of the Book, a four year book design course in typography and illustration also at RMIT.

Critical reception Audiences for the exhibition, Send Me Some More Paint! at the Australian War Memorial over the first half of 1989, and then touring regional and capital cities, were surveyed by a marketing company, and beside Stella Bowen's Hallifax Crew, William Dobell's Billy Boy, Freedman's Beaufighter Pilot proved to be the most popular.

Reviewing Poster Art in Australia shown at the National Gallery of Australia in 1993, Sasha Grishin in noting a flowering of Australian poster art during WW I opines that; "The next 40 years of the commercial design of posters dealing with tourism, public transport, commercial advertising and issues thrown up by World War II were dominated by a number of competent, but not particularly exciting artists" amongst whom he includes Freedman, and concludes that "these posters are more of interest as social documents than as art objects.

Harold Freedman: The Big Picture, published for the artist's posthumous Ballarat exhibition of 2017, records that "While some of his contemporaries, notably Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, were also grafting away in commercial studios, Freedman enjoyed the challenge and made it central to his work, rather than seeing it as some irksome task."

Art historian Victoria Perin, who notes she was once a guide at the Australian War Memorial, and reviewing the same 2017 exhibition, writes of Freedman's official war art;His military sitters invariably exhibit a furrowed and intelligent seriousness. Like Ivor Hele, his colleague in the Army, Freedman was an exceptional flatterer of male faces. Absent from the exhibition, although in the catalogue, is Freedman portrait of a favourite Victoria Cross recipient, Pilot Officer Rawdon Middleton. After his cock-pit was fired upon over Italy, Middleton flew his damaged bomber over the Channel so that his crew could safely bail out close to the English shore. Middleton was grievously injured – his eye was hanging from its socket, his jaw was shattered – and the journey back to England took four agonising hours. As the plane could not land, once everyone else evacuated the pilot crashed it into the sea. The posthumous portrait is appropriately ghostly, painted from a second-hand sketch it is hazy and undefined. Yet again it features that intelligent, handsome stare. The face Freedman gave his decorated sitters was always intensely dignified, but he always gave them the same face.

In 2015 the artist's son David Freedman donated to the Art Gallery of Ballarat 31 works including a pastel portrait of Alan Marshall, other pastel, ink and pencil drawings, a gouache painting, posters and lithographs under the Government's Cultural Gifts Program. Ballarat in 2017 also acquired with funds from the Joe White Bequest Freedman's 45.5 × 61.4 cm lithographic poster Destroy Rats. Rats Destroy (1950s).

Exhibitions 1989: Send Me Some More Paint! survey of war art at the Australian War Memorial, then touring regional and capital cities 2017, 31 March – 28 May: Harold Freedman: Artist for the People, posthumous retrospective, Ian Potter Foundation Gallery, Art Gallery of Ballarat, curated by Julie McLaren. RAAF Museum, Point Cook State Library of Victoria

Murals Australian War Memorial; History of Military Aviation Melbourne Airport's international terminal (1971 – History of Flight – variously-sized paintings with wing-like sculptural surrounds by Geoffrey Wilkinson) Spencer Street station: ''Cavalcade of Transport State Artist of Victoria (1972–83); the only person ever so honoured

Publications illustrated by

Publications about