Barnett Freedman

A few snaps from the Barnett Freedman exhibition at @pallanthousegallery are enough to remind anyone why his work continues to resonate. It’s a feast for anyone who loves design that straddles the every day and the extraordinary: hand-drawn typography on chocolate wrappers, Ealing Studios title cards, Lyons Tea Room memorabilia for the Queen’s Coronation, dramatic book covers, Ex Libris plates, and even postage stamps. For me, the slyly shifty Napoleon and menacing Bill Sykes illustrations stood out—characters brought to life with just a few strokes, their personalities leaping off the page.

Freedman was a master of the "in-between." He thrived in the grey area where fine art meets commercial art, unapologetically elevating objects of mass production into cultural artefacts. This intersection of the manual and mechanical is beautifully captured in Rowan Williams’s review for The Guardian:

"Freedman worked in the history of mass production when the relentless power of machines was wielded with the help of human skill and knack… It was in this intersection of manual and mechanical that Freedman flourished and did his most outstanding work."

Freedman had an innate ability to erase the boundaries between the gallery and the grocery store, between a Shakespeare edition and a biscuit wrapper. His lithographs for Lyons Tea Rooms, commissioned to cover peeling postwar walls, brought art into the every day with elegance and charm. His stamps for George V’s silver jubilee, widely circulated and universally admired, arguably made him one of his time's most "seen" artists.

Walking through the exhibition, I geeked out over some of the displayed postage stamps—familiar pieces I already own, now reframed as part of a much larger story. Freedman’s work invites this kind of personal connection. It’s proof that great design doesn’t need to sit on a pedestal. Instead, it can meet us where we live, in our tea shops, bookshelves, and letterboxes—an enduring reminder of the power of design to transform the mundane into the meaningful.

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