Marvin Friedman: News and Views from New Jersey Jews

The title of this blog post is taken from the subject line of an email I received from Marvin Friedman on March 2, 2009.  Marvin usually wrote short, chatty emails with run-on sentences.  They often conveyed an unfiltered honesty about what he was doing and thinking.  One line from the email reads:

“i’ve been trying to do some  painting..some casual watercolor portraits.of anybody that comes by. i’ve drawn about 6 and when i get 12 or so i’ll paint in an orgiastic fervor. i learned this from grandma moses.”

That was Marvin.  He had a lot to say and a passionate way to say it, as if he couldn’t get the words out fast enough.  Marvin was also suffering with Parkinson’s at the time, which sometimes made typing easier than drawing for him.  Drawing and painting was like breathing for Marvin.  He desperately needed it.  But he was also a storyteller and found a good deal of satisfaction in writing his stories.  And oh, what a storyteller Marvin was.  If you look up the stories he wrote for Hadassah magazine, you’ll find someone who had as honest a way with words as he did with a pen and brush.

I first met Marvin in the late 1980s, around 1988.  I was in grad school at the Tyler School of Art (Temple University) in Philadelphia, and ran across Marvin as he and his wife Sonny were taking down an exhibition of his work at a café in downtown Philadelphia.  I recognized Marvin’s work right away, having seen his wonderful ink drawings in the pages of Gourmet magazine, and excitedly went up to introduce myself and to tell him how much I enjoyed his illustrations.  He was gruff and rather off-putting, which was disappointing.  Later, as he and Sonny were getting ready to leave the café, Marvin came up to me to apologize.  The illustration field was, according to Marvin, a “bastardly one”, and he was thoroughly disgusted with of it.  He thanked me for the kind words and told me that if I was ever in the area, I was welcome to visit him at his New Jersey studio. 

I did not take Marvin up on his offer of studio visit until a few years later.  In 1995, he had an exhibition of his work at the Jewish Community Center in Princeton, New Jersey.  I was visiting from Wisconsin at the time and was smitten with one of the works, Ridley Park, which I purchased.  I wrote Marvin a letter, telling him about the artwork and recounting our meeting in Philadelphia.  He wrote back, again extending an invitation to visit his studio the next time I was in the state. That’s when our friendship grew.   I would usually visit family in New Jersey a couple of times a year, and would meet with Sonny and Marvin once a year or so.  They lived in West Trenton, and Marvin had a small studio behind their house, tucked into a wooded lot.  Marvin’s work adorned the walls in the house.   Ink drawings, pencil and watercolor pieces, oil paintings.  The works told the story of the man’s life and career.  Over the years, my wife, mother and son all visited with the Friedmans, listening to stories of artmaking, food, Philadelphia and more.

By the 1990s, Marvin was doing only occasional illustration work, though he took some glee in being able to find location references online, rather than having to schlepp into the city.  Walt Reed, in his book, The Illustrator in American: 1880 – 1980, noted that Marvin could handle “…the most complex subject matter with a direct reportorial manner.”  Marvin worked from both life and photographs, maintaining an immediate reportage quality in his work.  Even pieces that appeared to be simply thrown-off had an armature of formal understanding beneath them. 

When Marvin stopped doing his monthly gig for Gourmet magazine, he was still reporting.   His true love was storytelling, and he told his stories in both words and images.  Many of these stories were autobiographical, usually dealing with memories of relatives. Other stories were about influences, such as a wonderful pencil and watercolor piece about Jack Benny, or one of the numerous drawings about the French artist Pierre Bonnard.  Marvin was deeply influenced by Bonnard’s work, and you can see some of those influences enter into his own work.  Slightly tilted planes, patterns and textures, elements often found in Bonnard’s work, sometimes leaked into Marvin’s work as well.  Marvin and Sonny visited Bonnard’s house in Le Cannet, France, which became the subject of multiple pieces, notably Bonnard’s bathroom, the site of his famous “Nude in Bathtub” painting.  Marvin even referenced Bonnard in his email address: mfbonnard@yahoo.com.   

My wife and I have a number of Marvin’s originals hanging in our house.  Marvin gave us a number of them, with others comes from sales and auctions.  I think about him often as I look at the physicality of his work.  Marvin was as physical an artist as the painter Philip Guson in his drawings, watercolors and illustrations, but his approach was completely different.  So much of Marvin’s work was how that line of his created movement, supported by the previously mentioned composition, texture and pattern.  At one point he told me that he drew with what he referred to as a “butcher’s stick”, which I have only seen referenced in images of Dorje Shugden, a Buddhist deity.  The context that Marvin gave was that it was a stick used by butcher’s to somehow hold meat together.  By the 1990s, he was no longer able to find this tool, and it looks like he switched to something more like a bamboo pen, or maybe even a wooden chopstick shaved to a sharper point.  The line doesn’t often have a lot of thick and thin variation, though you can see where the ink starts to trail off before the stick is dipped in India ink again.  Marvin’s watercolor pieces were typically drawn in pencil first.  Marvin had a fairly heavy-handed approach with his drawing tools, so every mark was made with roughly the same weight, before the watercolor was laid down.  The delicacy of Marvin’s watercolor is a nice counterpoint to the weightiness of the line work. 

Marvin passed away on May 12, 2012.  He was 81 years old.  I don’t recall the exact date of my last visit with him, but it was within a year of Marvin’s passing.  He was his usual sharp, wonderful self, though physically he was having greater difficulties.  Marvin was using a walker in their small house and I helped him navigate the narrow hall to the bathroom at one point.  I see Marvin’s originals in our house everyday and I think about him quite often, thankful that our first cranky encounter was not our last one. 

The following two pieces are a nice juxtaposition about Marvin’s love for Pierre Bonnard’s work. The color still-life is mixed-media, with collage elements underneath the gouache and watercolor. The black and white image is a clear homage to Bonnard.

The following painting appeared in the September 1971 issue of Boy’s Life magazine. It’s from a story titled “Boy on a Barge”, written and illustrated by Marvin, who spent time with a Dutch family in Rotterdam on their houseboat barge.

The above illustration appeared in Boy’s Life, likely from the 1990s. Marvin signed it to us in 2008. It’s a wonderful example of his pencil and watercolor work, letting the pencil create the structure of the image, while the watercolor helps to convey a richness and depth.

Family meant a great deal to Marvin. In my digital files, I have a conversation between Marvin and his Aunt Sarah, who he clearly adored. Below is a not-so-great scan from a color photocopy. But you can sense Marvin’s love in the piece. Also the awkwardness of the composition, which is almost Alice Neel-like in some ways, particularly the leg of the chair closest to the viewer being place directly on the lower edge of the picture plane.

Marvin came back to his father’s Ridley Park, Pennsylvania hardware store as the subject matter for a number of the drawings. The one below looks as if it was being laid out for a book, but I don’t know if it was ever published:

I do wish I had a better scan of the Jack Benny piece below. I can still picture the piece hanging on the wall in Marvin and Sonny’s house, close to the dining room. This looks to be a scan from a color photocopy. The colors are warmer and less garish in person.

Leif Peng did a deep dive into Marvin’s career in 2009, in his wonderful Today’s Inspiration blog:

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

In 2012, Leif penned an equally wonderful farewell to our friend Marvin.

One of Marvin’s relatives put together a website with Marvin’s work in 2011. While the platform is woefully out of date, the website remains a fine tribute to a wonderful man and his work.