David Friedman Collection

David Friemdan (1893-1980) was an Austrian-born painter, portraitist, and graphic artist. A survivor of the Holocaust, Friemdan’s postwar journey led from Czechoslovakia to Israel and finally to the United States. His career as a commercial artist included freelance press work, theatrical scenery, and outdoor billboards. The David Friedman Collection contains original works of art, etchings, published materials, and scrapbooks donated by his daughter, Miriam Friedman Morris.

The scrapbooks in the collection contain both personal and professional ephemera, as well as numerous photographs, and serve as a document of Friedman’s life in the United States. Several photographs depict Friedman’s work as a billboard sign painter. At age 61, he auditioned for GOA -General Outdoor Advertising Company, Inc., and was hired on the spot. Friedman was transferred from New York City to Chicago, and in 1956, he accepted the position as top painter at the company’s St. Louis branch. During his career at GOA, Friemdan produced 150 billboards for companies such as Hunts Tomato Sauce, 7-Up, Michelob, Falstaff Beer, and Anheuser-Busch.

Friedman retired from his commercial art career in 1962, but continued to focus on his art practice and produce work that proved meaningful to him and his lived experience. The sketches in the David Friedman Collection are part of his series Enjoyment in Libraries with the Candid Pencil of David Friedman. The Dowd Illustration Research Archive holds over 25 boxes of his library portraits, which feature patrons from throughout the St. Louis area. The artwork showcases Friedman’s mastery of observation and documents daily life in the spaces he found personally healing. The following quote from Friedman illustrates the personal importance of libraries: “I needed to forget about the concentration camps and the horror that was there… So it was a pleasure to go to the library.”

Miriam Friedman Morris has worked to recover prewar pieces from her father, which involved research and identification from both museum and personal collections. The works of David Friedman are represented in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, New Synagogue Berlin-Centrum Judaicum; the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Ostrava Museum, the Sokolov Museum, Czech Republic, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, the Cleveland Public Library, the St. Louis Public Library, and the permanent exhibitions of the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center and the Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

The David Friedman Collection, housed in WashU Libraries’ Special Collections, is a product of Morris’s efforts to make his works known and accessible. The Dowd Illustration Research Archive will continue to preserve this important facet of his legacy by making Friedman’s original works of art and ephemera permanently accessible to researchers and patrons.