Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art

Survival of a Jewish Artist
June 11 - September 3, 2006

This exhibition of sixteen selected works from the Theodore Fried collection is the Museum’s first opportunity to introduce the community to the life and work of Theodore Fried. Fried, a talented young artist, spent the first half of his life fleeing unrest caused by the imposition of political ideologies on the arts. Born in Budapest in 1902, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1920, just after Hungarian avant-garde artists who supported the 1919 Revolution were forced to emigrate.

Following the path of many other young modernists, Fried rejected academic painting and joined the wave of artistic emigration from Budapest to Vienna, and then to Paris in 1926. Joining Jewish émigré artists included in the circle of non-French artists known as the École de Paris, Fried arrived well into the development of movements such as Cubism, Poetic Expressionism, and Surrealism. Fried exhibited with Picasso, Modigliani, and Kandinsky as he fused the lessons of the École de Paris into a style which spoke of his love of people, music, andthe land.

But Fried was fated to flee again. Fried escaped from Paris in 1940 just ahead of the German occupation, making his way south to Toulouse. In 1942 Fried and his family finally left France for New York City with a group of other endangered artists. Fried’s art, however, was left in hiding. During the years he waited in Toulouse, he stored his work and was forced to leave it in France. It was not recovered until 1979.

After his arrival in New York in 1942, Fried established a studio and began to rebuild a body of American works. Exploring neighborhood life, Fried began to show his modern paintings in contemporary exhibitions, garnering fresh recognition of his figurative works and color compositions.