Arts and Letters

Leo Friedlander, a sculptor of great integrity, was born in New York City on July 6, 1888. His vision and artistic wisdom were forged by an inner feeling and a knowledge that he began to acquire in the arts when he was very young. At the age of twelve he decided to become an artist and began to study for what was to become a great career. He developed his natural talent to a masterful degree to serve the arts during a long, honorable, and productive lifetime.

Because he was pure in heart and honest in mind, he believed in certain principles, cardinal among which was that to be great and to endure, art must be created with values of eternal beauty. He would say: "Art should manifest itself by imparting to the viewer a sense of spiritual and visual elation, not revulsion." He thought that anything done under the pretense of creating art would be nothing more than ephemeral vegetation, condemned to disappear very quickly, much as things born biologically immature and defective are doomed to die because of their inherent flaws.

Friedlander would never, either for reasons of snobbery or for an easy, quick, profitable success, do what he did not approve; nor would he indulge himself or his work in the passing fashions of the moment. He did what he thought right and worked hard, without compromise, and achieved a success that was genuine. That success is permanent.

His art is solid, sincere, and nurtured in the precepts of classicism, yet with a fresh approach that is in tune with our time. For this reason, the work he has left us commands respect, admiration, and the appellation of truly contemporary. If he was an academician, it cannot be said that he was a sterile one. He felt that the incoherent stammering of those who engage in the avant-garde extremism of the "far out" is even more deplorable than the artistic ineptitude of those who practise realism at its most decadent levels. "At least anachronism in art is preferable to anarchy," he said. "If we permit these avant-garde protagonists to bludgeon an uninformed public into accepting their weird credos, then education in art for the masses will truly resolve itself into a situation of the blind leading the blind."

Friedlander found his niche far above these two extremes, above the trivial and uninteresting of one group and above the incomprehensible of the other. Fortified with an unshaking faith, unconcerned with the temporal changes in art fashions, with honest conscience he went forth to create—for creator he was—and produced sculpture that will live in dignity, strength, and beauty. Friedlander was a versatile sculptor, very much at ease with any composition. He had an intuitive sense of monumental scale relationship. But he could work in any size, from the miniature of medallic art to the monumental that he did so well. He was able to impart charm and beauty to the former, and strength and vigor to the latter. He was best known and will be long remembered for his majestic and heroic-sized compositions.

Among his magnificent works, one will recall his two bronze equestrian groups, "Valor" and "Sacrifice," each nineteen feet high and ten feet wide, placed at the Washington end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. One should remember his great figures representing the "Four Freedoms" that he designed for the 1939-40 New York World's Fair; his monumental archangel in granite which stands in the American Military Cemetery at Hamm, Luxembourg; the marble figure "Memory," twenty-two feet high, for the War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia; the "Pioneer Woman" at the State College for Women in Denton, Texas; the great relief panels, "Lewis and Clark" and "The Covered Wagon," for the Oregon State capitol; the figure in granite of Roger Williams placed at Columbia Terrace in Providence, Rhode Island; the sculptures for the George Eastman Memorial in Rochester; the four panels for the north and south entrances of the Radio Corporation of America building at Rockefeller Center in New York City; the sculptured clock in the House of Representatives chamber in our nation's capital; and the sixteen-foot figure of Christ for the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., to realize that Friedlander had stature and that, having served well the field of sculpture in America, he deserves the well-earned respect of all.

It was with conviction that Friedlander carried out his work in the personal style he had developed for himself. But he also believed in diversity in artistic expression and felt that one style if carried out too long by its practitioner would in the end become monotonous and devoid of lively interest. And he had respect and admiration for talented artists, even if their artistic styles were quite different from his own. I recall one instance when sitting with him on a jury for the award of the Prix de Rome in sculpture. Although certain works submitted were of styles that were radically different from his own, he defended the merits of these works and pointed out their qualities in a very liberal and broad-minded way. I often felt that less liberal jurors and academic practitioners would not endorse so enthusiastically works that differed markedly from their own.

Friedlander was a kind and a gentle man, loved by all those who knew him well. He was compassionate and always ready to help when help was needed. He had a good sense of humor and we loved his company.

Ernest H. Sommerfeld, a minister in White Plains, New York, perhaps summed it up best in a portion of his tribute delivered at Leo Friedlander's funeral service:

Fine craftsmanship comes out of fine men. The perception is there, the vision, the dream, and after the dream, the discipline, the discipline of learning and learning and trying and trying, without which there is no art.

There are people who so live that they give to us a quality of human life. They show us what it is to be man at his best in some particular, and they cheer us even when our own lives do not dwell on that particular. We who are not composers hear the music and are moved because in us there is a talent of recognition. So it is that our lives are enriched in so many ways by so many peoples.

He is now gone, for he passed away the 24th of October, 1966; gone in flesh but not in spirit. We will miss him and remember him with affection. But the spirit that he has left in his work, which is here with us to stay, will always be cherished and revered by all, and particularly by all those who loved him and were his friends.