Barnett Freedman / Gilbert White review, Pallant House: Full of life and fervour

What is modern Britain? Britain now is face masks; social distancing; deal or no deal. It is a year to remember. It will live on in our memories of failed sourdough attempts and clapping for the NHS on Thursday nights; and it will live in our art. Those who undertake the task of the artist accept a duty to be a chronicler of our times. Barnett Freedman’s Designs for Modern Britain, at Pallant House Gallery, is art of the everyday, for every one.  

What do we know of Freedman? Freedman’s art found you in the most unlikely of places – pubs, post offices, and book covers – before finding its place on the yellow and blue walls of the galleries. Indeed, a growing interest into the work made in this period has led eyes to wander from more well-known mid-century British designers, and onto Freedman’s proliferation of designs – ones that have not been given due attention.  

Though his Guinness posters most likely met blurry eyes, his book jacket designs demonstrate his lithographical skill. There is extraordinary care in every work. In 1931, his illustration for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer marked his first major commission; soon, designs for the book jackets of Oliver Twist, War and Peace and Anna Karenina were commissioned, the latter a particular triumph, often heralded as the apex of 20th-century book design. His visual language is exaggerated shadows, faces full of expression, with whispery, webby, cross-hatchings; they are full of life and fervour.  

When not adorning books, his distinctive style whizzed past on London Transport posters and took on the whimsy and theatrics that formed the language of his peers: Eric Ravillious, Edward Burra, Enid Marx. There are paintings for the people and paintings for the playhouse; drama is alive in the studies of Sicilian puppets, dancers and pipers. And this drama is brought to the platform edge, as a porcelain-crowned, rosy-cheeked actor with flowers in her hair dazzles and contrasts some curiously geometric design, in advertisements encouraging theatre and circus goers to “go by Underground”. Heck, he even makes spectacle out of throwing darts, as seen in Darts Champion (1956), where shadow creates movement and casts streaky darkness over fascinated faces.  

This precocious bunch studied at the Royal College of Art in 1922-25 under Paul Nash. Freedman’s cohort Ravillious is found in the Print Room below, in a particularly curious exploration of the natural world, and how Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne has inspired generations of writers, artists and naturalists. Gilbert White is an interesting character. One of the first naturalists, he highly influenced Charles Darwin and David Attenborough, but also aroused a spirit in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Virginia Woolf and Paul Nash. His Natural History assembles White’s daily observations of the animals, birds and plant life in his home town of Hampshire and in the nearby areas of the South Downs in Sussex. It has never been out of print and is said to be the fourth most published book in the English language; this exhibition showcases the many different versions of the iconic tome and its captivating illustrations, and salutes its flavourful afterlife. Ravillious, whose 1938 engravings feature in the exhibition, illustrated one of the 300-or-so editions, and asserted, “It is quite the best book I’ve ever been given to do and I love doing it.”

This intimate exploration leaves you surrounded at all angles by grasshopper larks, starlings, beehives, tree-tunnels, snakes, owls, particularly feisty carp, and the heavy petulance of rain. Particular successes come in a dramatic “Tortoise and Snake” by Gertrude Hermes (1931), where the snake twists and writhes with a biting dynamism and the tortoise splays triumphantly, rendered in bold geometricism and repeated pattern to fossil-like effect. Clare Leighton’s “Birdnesting” is revelatory, focusing on human life. Her male protagonist slumps on the tree surrounded by calligraphic birds, weary from stealing too many eggs.  

Immerse yourself in White’s natural world and the building momentum will be clear to see, as artists focus on particular passages, lines or themes. Assembled together, they weave a riveting web that tells a multitude of stories. Each print is paired with a corresponding excerpt; it is entirely too easy to get lost in the words and lose track of time in this square little room.  

In a year that started with the devastation of wildfires in Australia, and continues with a ravishing of our natural environment, there is a strange parallel with the letters of White. In one 1789 letter, White writes, “That fire, following the roots, consumes the very ground; so that for hundreds of acres nothing is to be seen but smother and desolation, the whole circuit round looking like the cinders of a volcano; and the soil being quite exhausted, no traces of vegetation to be found for years.” Still poignant today, White’s exploration and adoration of nature is a reminder to pause, and appreciate natural beauty, and protect it at all costs. This exhibition encourages one to wander and wonder.