Karl Rudolph Free (May 16, 1903 – February 16, 1947) was an American artist and museum curator, best known for his New Deal-era post office murals.
Many of his surviving works on paper are circus scenes in watercolor. Early in his career he was recognized for his etchings and prints, often on religious themes. His art is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and MoMA in New York City; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Figge Art Museum in his hometown of Davenport, Iowa.
Early years Free was born in Scott County, Iowa, in 1903, the second of the five children of mail carrier Henry Rudolph Free and his wife Anna (Eckhardt)."Iowa, County Births, 1880-1935," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XVNV-XVD : April 1, 2020), Karl Rudolph Free, May 16, 1903; citing Iowa, United States; county district courts, Iowa; FHL microfilm 2,070,905. He completed four years of high school, graduating from Davenport High in 1921.
In 1923, Free won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York. His teachers included Allen Tucker, Joseph Pennell, Boardman Robinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. A newspaper art critic visited Pennell's class in spring 1924 and reported that "Karl Free, in a delicately drawn composition, amusingly caricatures palm trees.""Art Exhibitions of the Week – Moderns on Display." The New York Times, April 6, 1924, pp. 1.
Free was positively reviewed in a New York Evening Post article about the 1925 Whitney Studio show. In 1927, he had a painting listed for $150 in a Whitney catalog; the highest priced painting in the catalog was $3,500 for a picture by John Sloan, one of the leaders of the Ashcan School. (This may have been the 12th annual Whitney Studio show.) In 1928, he sold a painting, Landscape with Ponies, for $150, less commission of 20 to 25 percent, at a Whitney Studio Club show hosted by the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans.
In January 1929, he had a one-man exhibition of nine of his watercolors and oil paintings at the Whitney Studio Galleries on Eighth Street.Jewell, Edward Alden, "Parnassian Suppers: Hors D'Oeuvres: Stream Line – Champagne and Humbler Beverages Liberally Served." The New York Times, January 13, 1929, pp. 120. There were four one-man shows, each with their own space within the building; the other artists were Henri Burkhard, Max Kuehne, and Joseph Pollet. Edward Alden Jewell, art critic of The New York Times, visited the show and wrote positively of Free's painting: "There is magic in the lane that runs between dense rows of trees and in the Rising Storm. It is the delicate spell about to be cast, the sense of something hovering." Jewell also mentioned paintings called The Hunt and Legend. Rising Storm was reproduced in the "Exhibitions Coming and Going" column of the January 1929 issue of The Arts magazine.
In 1929, Free was included in a Whitney Studios show called the Circus in Paint. (Much of Free's work that remains in the Whitney collection takes the circus as subject matter; these pictures may date from this show.) Free's The Parade was reproduced in a Vogue magazine article by Helen Appleton Read about this show. She wrote:
Mr. Free is still in his twenties, but he has remained curiously aloof from the stylisms and technical virtuosity that frequently characterize youthful expression in the fine arts. He presents his fantastic themes with disarming directness...It is characteristic of this artist's work that, while adhering to reality, he is apt to seize upon some unusual angle of perspective or emphasize some fantastic episode, which gives the drawings a curiously arresting quality.
(As a counterpoint, in 1991 some of Free's circus paintings were included in a show called Under the Big Top at the Heckscher Museum on Long Island; a critic from The New York Times described them as "stiff, crowded compositions [that] fail to communicate the verve of the three-ring extravaganza.")
Free was included in a show at the Gladys Roosevelt Dick Gallery in summer 1929.Jewell, Edward Alden (June 30, 1929). Swelter and Breeze: Many Local Galleries Still Open – Colonies Preparing for Seasonal Festivities Art Shown in Cincinnati. The New York Times Five "mounted watercolors" by Free, $60 each, were included in the Whitney's 1929 Christmas sale.
Whitney Museum assistant curator Free was hired in 1930 as an assistant or associate curator, responsible for prints, at the newly founded Whitney Museum of American Art. (Avis Berman, who wrote the major biography of Whitney founding director Juliana Force, says he was responsible for watercolors.) The other founding curators were Hermon More, Lloyd Goodrich, and Edmund Archer. At the time of the founding, Free and Goodrich were both noted as students at the National Academy of Design. Archer, More, and Free "lived in studios on the premises," as did Beauford Delaney, who was hired as a museum guard, "with free studio and living space in the basement."
A cast-aluminum "white metal" eagle designed by Free, once prominently displayed above the front door of Whitney Museum's original Eighth Street location, was uncovered in 2015. It had been installed in approximately 1931 when the architects gave the building a "coating of salmon-colored stucco and a modernistic entranceway [of] severe white marble columns [that] support a giant entablature, itself topped by an eagle."Gray, Christopher. "Streetscapes/The 1931 Whitney Museum; 'Rebels on Eighth Street' Redux." The New York Times, September 12, 1993. The eagle has been described as a "guardian figure...crouched protectively over the door." The eagle was later adapted for the museum's stationery. Free's 1931 design was later "sculpted by Lewis Iselin on a 1954 commission and cast by Roman Bronze Works." (The Whitney moved around Manhattan over the years; this bronze eagle was eventually relocated to Washington, D.C., thanks in part to efforts of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.)
Bruce Buttfield primarily designed the interiors of the original Whitney building, but Free was one of four artists said to have contributed additional "decorative detail" of the space.
Free contributed two essays to the catalog for the Whitney's first themed exhibition in 1932, "Provincial Paintings of the 19th Century, Audubon Prints, Colored Lithographs, and Thomas Nast Cartoons from the Permanent Collection," one articulating the artistic merits of scientific illustration represented by Audubon's work, and one on the history of lithography, a low-cost printing process that made art more readily accessible to the masses.
Online passenger manifests and library catalog entries describing Free's sketchbooks indicate that he traveled back and forth to Europe several times in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His 1929 watercolor Souvenir of Brussels was shown in the Art Institute of Chicago's Century of Progress exhibition in 1933.
In a 1970 memoir piece published in American Heritage magazine, Edward Laning recalled that in 1934, with the Great Depression well upon them:
...the plight of all artists was growing desperate. A demonstration was held in front of the Whitney Museum on Eighth Street, complete with placards and chants and shouted imprecations, and was dispersed by the police. My friend Karl Free, a curator of the Whitney and one of the most brilliant artists of the time, leaned out an upper window of the beleaguered museum and called to many of the demonstrators below, 'I know you, So-and-So, and you, Such-and-Such,' implying that he meant to blacklist them forever.
(Whitney Museum director Juliana Force was also regional chairman of the Public Works of Art Project. The artists were protesting at her Whitney office against a government edict that she reduce the number of PWAP-employed artists by half from a maximum of 722 by May 1, 1934.)
In spring 1935, the Whitney put on the first-ever American show of abstract painting, primarily organized by Karl Free and Hermon More. Rebels on Eighth Street, the major published history of the museum's early years, calls this "an act of vision on the part of More and Free...because they...were much more at home with representational art."
On June 19, 1935, Karl R. Free, as "assignor to the Whitney Museum of American Art", was granted U.S. patent number 1,963,124 for an "assembled picture frame".
In 1936, Free had a pair of pictures, Acrobats and Fantasia, included in an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1937, he designed costumes for the Ballet Caravan production of Pocahontas, composed by Elliott Carter. The designs are held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Four pictures from the larger collection of 25 were included the Lincoln Kirstein's Modern show in 2019.
In spring 1938 Free was one of three jurors for the American Institute of Graphic Arts Fifty American Prints show, held at the gallery of the Architectural League on E. 40th Street.
Post office murals Both of Free's United States post office murals with Native American subjects have been challenged as ethnographically incorrect and offensive; both remain as historically significant exemplars of New Deal-era public artworks. The murals in the federal building are legally protected by the National Historic Preservation Act.
Washington, D.C.
Creation Sometime between 1936 and 1938 (artists had a two-year window within which to produce their commissions), the U.S. Department of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts hired Karl R. Free to paint two murals, Arrival of the Mail at New Amsterdam and French Huguenots in Florida, at what was then the headquarters of the United States Postal Service (now the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building) in Washington, D.C.
The oil-on-canvas murals, which are tall by wide, are located on the seventh floor of the south wing of the building, in a space currently occupied by the Environmental Protection Agency and closed to the general public except during pre-arranged guided tours. French Huguenots in Florida is the title displayed on the placard beside the mural in the building; it is alternately called French Explorers and Indians.
Free was among six painters (the others being Alfred Crimi, George Harding, Ward Lockwood, Frank Mechau, and William C. Palmer) selected to fill 11 remaining mural spaces in the second part of a competition to adorn the Post Office and Justice buildings.
According to Karal Ann Marling's Wall to Wall America: Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, the image of the encounter between the French and Native Americans was rejected by the Treasury federal art department in 1935 because "the composition fails through the center." The same design was later accepted and publicized by the Treasury Department as re-enacting a "picturesque legend."
The French Huguenots in Florida mural is meant to depict the encounter on June 27, 1564, between Timucuan people and French Huguenots led by René Goulaine de Laudonnière. Free used a "1591 engraving by Theodorus de Bry of a sketch by Jacques Le Moyne" and a set of "1585–86 watercolors by John White that depict the [Algonquian-speaking people] of present-day North Carolina" as his visual models, resulting in a "picture that blends his cultural perceptions of the 1930s with the sixteenth-century source material."
Reception and objections At the time of their unveiling in February 1938, the "Art Notes" column of The Washington Star wrote of the murals, "These works resemble in general character paintings by Howard Pyle and C. Y. Turner made in the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th. They are reasonably historical and essentially pictorial. They do not, however, mark any progress in art." In 1941, The New York Times called them "conventionally decorative."