Barnett Freedman — Fleece Press Sale Broadsheet for the Artist’s Personal Archive, 2008

Title: Barnett Freedman was the finest modern lithographer…
Printer: The Fleece Press
Issued by: Simon Lawrence
Date: July 2008
Edition: First edition
Format: Folding broadsheet / sale announcement
Size: 30.2 × 22.6 cm
Stock Code: 004190
Location: Ephemera Drawer, Bookroom
Sleeve: Design A

First edition of this privately printed Fleece Press broadsheet announcing the sale of Barnett Freedman’s personal stock of posters, proofs, original artwork and related material, issued by Simon Lawrence in July 2008. Printed at the Fleece Press, the sheet is headed with an illustration after Freedman and boldly declares him to have been “the finest modern lithographer”, before announcing that material retained by the artist’s family was being offered for sale through Lawrence.

The broadsheet is important as a piece of primary-market documentation relating directly to the dispersal of Freedman’s own working and retained archive. The text specifies the breadth of material then available: life drawings from the 1920s, original illustrations, proof dustwrappers, sheets of illustrations, posters for buses and trains, Guinness and Lyons material, Christmas cards and other works. It therefore records a distinct moment in the posthumous history of Freedman’s work, when personal stock preserved by his family was being brought onto the market.

The sheet also has a strong connection with the Fleece Press’s sustained scholarly interest in Freedman. Simon Lawrence’s press had already published Ian Rogerson’s Barnett Freedman: The Graphic Art in 2006, with an essay by Michael Twyman on Freedman as a master lithographer; the Fleece Press bibliography records that work as one of the Press’s principal publications devoted to twentieth-century British graphic art. The present broadsheet belongs to the same period of concentrated reassessment and documentation of Freedman’s career.

Barnett Freedman (1901–1958) was one of the most distinctive British graphic artists and lithographers of the twentieth century, particularly associated with illustrated books, transport posters, advertising design and wartime work. His importance lies in the way he brought a painterly, hand-drawn quality to commercial lithography and book illustration, and his work for publishers, transport bodies and major commercial clients has remained highly collectable.

The present example is in very good condition, with some scattered spotting but otherwise clean and well preserved. The folding structure is sound and the printed image and text remain clear and strong. Now housed in a clear acetate sleeve, Design A, for protection.

Very good.

A scarce and highly relevant piece of Fleece Press and Barnett Freedman ephemera, documenting the dispersal of the artist’s own retained stock and forming an interesting companion to the Fleece Press publications devoted to his graphic work.

Stock code: 004190. Location: Ephemera Drawer, Bookroom. Sleeve Design A.

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