Maurice Freed
1911-1981

Maurice Freed, a native of Pottsville, Pa. and a graduate of the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), lived and painted in Philadelphia during most of his life. At the age of 19, he won a scholarship to the Cape School of Art in Provincetown where he studied with Henry Hensche, Morris Davidson, and Albert Alcalay. In 1934, at the age of 23, his talents were recognized when he was invited to Chicago to become Co-Art Director of Esquire magazine.

As an illustrator, Maurice Freed’s work was published in Esquire, The New Yorker, Holiday Magazine, as well as a cover for Fortune Magazine. Following his early professional success at Esquire and as a regular contributor to the New Yorker and other magazines, and after 14 years of operating a prosperous advertising art service, Freed turned his attention from illustration and commercial art to painting and the fine arts. From 1960 until his death in 1981, he devoted himself to painting and to the art world around him.

Freed gained international recognition from his year-long sojourn in France in 1960, being featured in a lead article in Information Artistique (Paris, 1961) and upon his return, in The American Artist (New York, 1962).

Maurice Freed’s paintings are represented in private collections both in the United States and throughout Europe. He exhibited widely in one-man and group shows at such places as La Boutique d’Art in Nice, the Newman Contemporary Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Woodmere Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Chicago Art Institute and Butler Institute.