Terry Friedman, 1940-2013

Abstract

Terry Friedman, who has died suddenly aged 72, was a rare being - a scholar curator working in a regional museum, and an outstanding art historian, educator and collector. Between 1969 and 1993, as Keeper of Decorative Art Studies at Temple Newsam, Leeds, and, later, as Principal Keeper at Leeds City Art Gallery, where he was largely responsible for setting up the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Terry made a major but largely unsung contribution to the cultural life of his adopted city. Both the contemporary and historic collections benefited from his acquisitions: he masterminded a decade of memorable exhibitions while, at the study centre, by linking collections and exhibition curatorship with research, he established a unique, powerful identity for Leeds's partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation. He fostered the talent of many young art historians and artists in his roles as teacher, collector and curator. One of the finest architectural historians of his generation, and the leading authority on eighteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture, he was the author of two classics - James Gibbs (Yale University Press, 1984) and the magisterial The Eighteenth-Century Church in Britain (Yale University Press, 2011), for which, in 2012, he won the William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History.Born in Detroit, Michigan, into a liberal Jewish family, Terry attended the University of Michigan, followed in 1964 by the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. There he wrote his doctorate on James Gibbs. In 1969 he moved to Leeds, which would be his home for the rest of his life, to run the BA in the History of Decorative Arts and Museum Studies, then a unique partnership between a municipal gallery and a university. Based at Temple Newsam House, the course nurtured a number of curators and scholars who went on to heritage, curatorial and academic careers.In 1982 the Henry Moore Sculpture Galleries extension to Leeds City Art Gallery was completed. This development marked the beginning of the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture (which in 1993 became the Henry Moore Institute). Terry moved to the art gallery to set it up. With a succession of able assistants - Adam White, Daru Rooke and Ben Dhaliwal - he rapidly made his mark. The inaugural exhibition, Henry Moore: Early Carvings 1920-1940 (1982), sensitively installed and accompanied by a scholarly and welldesigned catalogue, with seminars and talks, set the pattern for the programme that followed. The development of archival and sculpture collections that embraced the processes of making sculpture as well as the finished product became and has remained a key feature of the collecting policy, buttressed by the Henry Moore Foundation's financial support. Terry's broad definition of sculpture to include casts, garden and architectural sculpture, coins, medals and sketches was ahead of its time, and set the tone for the research, symposia, exhibitions and artists' projects embracing the historic and contemporary that were subsequently pursued by the Institute.In addition to major purchases, such as Epstein's 1910 Indian-inspired carving Maternity repatriated from an American collection, gifts and bequests of sculpturerelated business papers, photographs and studio archives began to be offered to Leeds, inaugurating the development of a sculpture archive unrivalled in Britain outside the Tate. One of the first and largest of these gifts was the archive of Sir Hamo Thornycroft. Terry's championship of the nineteenth-century Leeds sculptor Joseph Gott, several of whose works he identified and purchased for very modest sums, resulted in important reappraisals of his work (1972 and 2010). …