Harold Freedman missing in action at Art Gallery of Ballarat

This Harold Freedman exhibition shows his works had a lot of energy but paid insufficient attention to the world.

Radio ops (1945) by Harold Freedman.

Many people today imagine the great art of the past was all made at the command of powerful patrons whereas modern artists are free to do as they like. The painters and sculptors of the Renaissance or baroque periods, they will insist, were forced to glorify their masters and to produce propaganda for the church, whereas artists today can express their own experience or social and political views.

Yet art today is no less involved with money, power and patronage than it has ever been. From the investment market and the record ­prices of auction houses to the corporate sponsorship of large-scale work and exhibitions as part of brand-building strategies, the contemporary art business is deeply concerned with money, power and fashion.

Patrons of the baroque period, meanwhile, eager to aggrandise themselves and their families, generally achieved this end through sponsoring important works of public art, especially building, restoring and decorating churches. And this in turn was predicated on the existence of shared religious faith: as in other societies under the same conditions, the powerful individual gains the respect and admiration of the community through a kind of self-effacement in the name of common belief.

Nor can the art made for the church during the medieval and Renaissance periods be thought of as propaganda, for religious belief was universal and shared by all. Propaganda consists, in its essence, in trying to persuade others of something you do not believe yourself, or that you do not believe in the simplistic way that you are presenting it. It is indeed only from the baroque period onwards that a significant gap begins to open up between what the edu­cated ruling class believes and what they want the masses to believe.

It is because of such developments in recent centuries that public art has become so elusive. The roots of the problem go back at least 300 years but it has grown increasingly acute in the course of the past two centuries: true public art of real distinction has grown rarer and in its place works of propaganda have proliferated, culminating in the art of the totalitarian regimes that were such a disastrous part of the history of the 20th century.

We can see a kind of epilogue to this development in the political themes that often emerge in contemporary art. These are broadly aligned with a new political left that has lost sight of its traditional social vision in an introverted preoccupation with marginal and identity issues. In the process, a large part of its former constituency has been abandoned to the new populists.

Artists, too, are often attracted to themes such as race and gender, harped on in art schools and easier to get excited about than the great, daunting and complex problems of the world: ecological sustainability, economic development and global equity. Fringe issues can provoke an intoxicating rush of resentment and self-righteousness but such passions are largely a form of moral self-indulgence, especially when turned to the past rather than the future.

It is in this wider context that we have to consider this interesting exhibition of an artist little known today yet who was appointed in 1972 as the first and only official artist of the state of Victoria. In the course of a long career, Harold Freedman (1915-99) tried his hand at almost every kind of art addressed to a large audience, from political cartoons to portraits, war and postwar propaganda, graphic design, commercial advertising, topographical illustration, children’s books and, in the later phase of his life, large-scale murals in paint and mosaic.

Yet there are surprisingly few things here, apart from the portraits and some early still lifes, that can be considered as interesting pictures in their own right — that could take their place in an exhibition of the art of their period without looking incongruous. One is a small painting of two radar operators during the war, both seen in profile. The young man closest to us is a dark silhouette, while the other is lit from behind. The two are intent on their work, together yet not speaking to each other.

In this composition Freedman is thinking like a painter, capturing something, as a short-story writer may, that cannot be evoked in any other way. Here, in effect, he goes beyond illustration: the world is transformed by imagination into something more than reportage. But why is this so rare? Why does his subsequent career turn away from intimacy and the imagination?

There is an early self-portrait, from 1940, from which we could infer a different kind of artistic ambition: it is painted in the style of Max Meldrum, with large blocks of colour and tone; the artist represents himself as a bohemian with cravat and pipe and palette held prominently. Behind him and on the left, a small framed landscape hints at other ambitions.

Yet in a second portrait, painted two years later when he had joined the airforce, all traces of bohemian individualism have been extinguished by an oppressive infantry greatcoat and hat that are more symbolic than real, since they do not correspond to any uniform he would have worn. The expression is stupefied; the eyes, alert in the first painting, seem vacant.

From the early years of the war, several political cartoons demonstrate considerable ability, with an understanding of the anatomical structure of the body and of movement that allow him to produce a range of formulaic but effective attitudes and postures. He is clearly influenced by great predecessors in Australian black-and-white illustration, including Norman and Lionel Lindsay and Will Dyson — Dyson’s sickly Kaiser, for example, is reincarnated as Freedman’s feeble Hitler.

From left, Freedman’s self-portrait (1940), his 1943 portrait of Alan Marshall and The Signal Man (1947).

Two studies of trees from these early years are telling: once again they show much ability, although the first especially is clearly indebted to Hans Heysen. There is no doubt a student capable of such work would stand out from his class as unusually talented. But one does not need to compare them to the truly remarkable tree studies of Lloyd Rees from a similar period to see how limited they are — how self-limited, as the hard outlines and summary shading demonstrate: content to go so far but no further.

That same utilitarian aesthetic is evident in the portrait drawings, including one of his mother and another of Alan Marshall. They are characteristically competent, but once again hard outlines reveal the instinct to limit and define rather than to remain open to complexity. These qualities become even more apparent in painted portraits, such as the one of a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force, which was reproduced in the Royal Australian Air Force’s wartime publications RAAF Saga (1944). There is a tendency to turn individuals into types or symbols, rather than to ponder what makes them individuals.

This tendency reaches caricatural form in the postwar series Men and Women of Service: the project was a kind of after-the-fact soft propaganda, intended to emphasise that those who had worked in the Victorian Railways during the war, and had been required to remain at their posts in an essential service, had made an important contribution to the war effort too. Freedman made seven large coloured lithographs that were displayed in railway stations for several years after their publication.

Each of these figures is designed as a type, which makes a kind of obtuseness inevitable, as in socialist realism. The stationmaster is stout and paternal, the signalman lean and anxious, and so on. Just as interesting to observe are the formulas employed in representing the features. The medium and scale of lithography seem to make these coarser than they would appear in painting. Once again, even to master these formulas demands skill and training that should not be underestim­ated, but they are applied with a kind of brutality to produce an effect that ultimately is profoundly cliched.

It is odd to pass from these earnest figures, intent on being socially useful and strictly bereft of inner life, to colourful commercial posters in a sort of international postwar modern decorator style. Clearly there is nothing aesthetically in common between the two sets of work, and we are left with the uncomfortable feeling the artist has nothing to say beyond responding to whatever commercial opportunities present themselves.

We see a different side of Freedman in the mural projects that occupied the last decades of his working life, and a short ABC documentary that is screened in the last room gives us some insight into his process, as he completes the first quarter of an immense mural — 10m x 40m — documenting the history of transport in Victoria. We find him, for example, going out to the country to sketch a team of oxen as they are yoked in the traditional way, and we see how the work on the mural is completed with the aid of a team of assistants.

Clearly, he takes pleasure in drawing from life, in historical research and in accuracy of representation. But the reproduction of the final work nearby suggests Freedman grew bored with the project and painted the last panels, or had them painted by assistants, largely from historical photographs and prints. But this is hardly surprising: the scale, combined with the banality of the commission, would be soul-destroying. The Sistine ceiling is more than twice this size, but then Michelangelo had a sublime subject: the creation of the world, the origin of sin and the necessity of redemption.

In later projects, such as the History of Geelong, we can see Freedman trying to escape from the monotonous rows of the earlier work, and in The Legend of Fire he attempts something iconographically more ambitious, although neither particularly thematically coherent nor compositionally unified. A successful mural must have clear themes, strong composition and harmony between these two elements, and Freedman achieves neither.

But above all there is the incompatibility between subject matter that aspires to be visionary and Freedman’s ultimately pedestrian style. Like all too many other artists, he chose to paint bigger rather than better. In the documentary, he makes a curious comment about not wanting to overpaint a work; but the truth is his work is overpainted in the sense of being too literal and underpainted in the sense of not taking enough trouble.

It is the same problem evident from the earliest drawings: there is a lot of energy but not enough real attention to the world; breadth but not depth; obsessive work, but no sense of discovery or willingness to dwell on subtleties and indeterminacies that might be illuminated by the painter’s art.

Harold Freedman: Artist for the People

Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, until May 28.