Looking at Barnett Freedman makes me weep at the government’s dismal graphics

Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear with a jacket by Barnett Freedman. You only need to see a corner of the cover — a stippled trompe-l’oeil scroll — to recognise the artist. Freedman, a Stepney Cockney born to Jewish-Russian parents in 1901, delighted in paper games. Maps unfurl, book leaves fly, cut-outs and cartouches abound. His designs are a miscellany of silhouettes, decoupage, concertinas, peek-a-boos, lift-the-flaps and grubby thumbprints. Edges are ragged, endpapers torn. On the dust jacket to Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1931), a military map has been imperfectly pasted over the back cover as if slapped up on a post alongside marching orders. Whatever glue Freedman uses, it always seems to be peeling.

This is a wholly lovely exhibition. I was cheered by Freedman’s jesting and left tearful by his wartime portraits. Freedman was among the ‘outbreak of talent’ generation identified by the Royal College of Art tutor Paul Nash: Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Enid Marx, Edward Burra and Freedman. His RCA paintings are not altogether successful: lumpen figures, clotted landscapes. In 1924, Freedman secretly married his fellow student Claudia Guercio, daughter of a Sicilian fruit exporter, and after graduating the following year the couple took two rooms near the Euston Road. Looking back on those years, Freedman remembered: ‘I nearly starved.’

Work picked up in 1927, when Freedman was commissioned to illustrate Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘The Wonder Night’, part of Faber & Gwyer’s (later Faber & Faber) series of Ariel Poems — decorated chapbooks intended ‘to take the place of Christmas cards and other similar tokens’. Freedman and Faber were a happy match.