After his death in Leeds, UK, The Sculpture Journal, in their tribute, defined him as ‘a rare being - a scholar curator working in a regional museum, and an outstanding art historian, educator and collector’.
[1] His book, The Eighteenth-Century Church in Britain, the first substantial study of the subject to appear in over half a century,[2] won the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History in 2012.
[1] After completing his PhD in the late 1960s, Dr Friedman moved to Leeds to take up his first postdoctoral position as Keeper of Decorative Art Studies at Temple Newsam House.
[5] It was to be a role he fulfilled until 1993 when he retired early to devote his time to what was to be his final book that involved extensive research in churches, chapels, vestries, vicarages, archives and county record offices all over Britain.
[7] This period in his career was to be a productive decade of important exhibitions, astute acquisitions and the imparting of knowledge through lectures and scholarly well-designed and illustrative catalogues, the cost of which he endeavoured to keep as low as possible so students could afford them.
The combination of superlative illustrations and incisive texts makes it the most authoritative and comprehensive publication available on Andy Goldsworthy’s early work’[10] and it has been reprinted several times.
[citation needed] The 1987 exhibition (with Evelyn Silber) ‘Jacob Epstein – Sculpture and Drawings’ travelled on to the Whitechapel Gallery, London when Nicholas Serota was its director.
Both were perfectionists and Evelyn Silber told a story at the Colloquium of how she had to, metaphorically speaking, pull them apart when an argument erupted over a particular case of exhibits as time was running out to open the Gallery to the Press.