Art: Postman-Painter

Every night for 37 years leathery, angular Arnold Friedman went home from his job as a Manhattan postal clerk to his attic studio in Queens. There he painted the people who had come up to his money-order window, the street scenes that had caught his eye. In 1937 he retired on pension, able at last to paint all day. Last Feb. 23 Arnold Friedman was 60. Same day the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought his painting Unemployable (see cut). By last week, when his one-man show opened in Manhattan’s Bonestell Gallery, modest Arnold Friedman was making a noise like a sure-enough artist.

Artist Friedman still paints mostly from memory. But for Unemployable he had a model: a broken old panhandler who came to the back door for a cup of coffee, left after one sitting and never came back. Artist Friedman put him on canvas in his faded overcoat and battered hat, with one eye out of focus. He spent most time painting the hand, made it the symbol of a working function that society had dis carded.

Other Friedman paintings are as sharp and simple, more cheerful. In subject they range from parkways to flower pieces, snowscapes to ball games. Though he once studied art at night school under Robert Henri (George Bellows, Guy Péne du Bois, Rockwell Kent were fellow students), critics persist in calling him a primitive. Arnold Friedman does not mind much. “A primitive,” says he, “is one who does not avail himself of the known tricks and is roundly scorned by those who recently have picked up the newest ones.”