Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Estate of the artist

Private Collection, New York

Private Collection, New Jersey

Friedman began his formal artistic training around 1905, perhaps first at the Art Students League, and then at the New York School of Art under the tutelage of Robert Henri. In 1909, he took a six-month leave of absence from his job in order to study art in Paris, during which he encountered the innovations of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Although still working in a realist style at that time, he began experimenting new formal vocabularies upon his return to the United States and was by 1918 working in a synchromist vein. He eventually abandoned these abstract explorations of color and shape in the development of what can be considered his mature aesthetic. Characterized by flat, unmodulated planes of color, these representational works rely heavily on linear rhythms and were often imbued with a sense of fantasy.

By 1929, however, color as defined by hue, texture, transparency and weight had become the “heartbeat of painting” for the artist.[1] Friedman’s material approach to painting is beautifully illustrated by the work Boat Basin from 1940. Likely depicting a marina in the Long Island area, the painting exudes an atmosphere of radiance and tranquility through the artist’s inventive use of his medium. His varied techniques of pigment application, rather than drawn lines, serve to define pictorial regions: the build-up of small dots of paint gives the sand a tactile realism, while the splotching of color in the sky evokes the indistinct forms of clouds. At the same time, the artist’s luminous palette endows the water with a shimmering quality. Friedman employs the moorings as framing devices in order to emphasize the materiality of the surface by leading the viewer’s eye through the center ground to the impasto of the sky. The poles also serve to counter the otherwise horizontal orientation of the composition, interrupting with their verticality the line of the water’s edge, the sand, and the horizon. Though no humans are visible in the image, Friedman includes certain indexical symbols, like the American flag flying on the pole and the birds feeding in the foreground, to imply their presence. This subtlety is crucial in fostering the mood of the work. The canvas is transformed into a physical manifestation of the emotions and sensations experienced by the individual who views this scene. In the end, Boat Basin is a celebration of the moment.

Arnold Friedman’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; and the Detroit Institute of Arts.