Durr Freedley

Curator and artist Durr Friedley (1888-1938) was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and received a

degree in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1911. (At Harvard and later in life his surname

was spelled Freedley; in records from his time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art it consistently

appears as Friedley.) He joined the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October, 1911, as

an assistant in the Department of Decorative Arts. In 1912, after favorable recommendations by

colleagues, Friedley was appointed Assistant Curator. He was promoted to Acting Curator in

1914 when the department’s Curator, Dr. Wilhelm R. Valentiner, took a leave of absence to enlist

in the German army. Valentiner resigned from the Metropolitan in 1917 and Friedley was offered

the post of Curator, but he declined and instead announced his own departure from the Museum.

During his time at the Museum, Friedley was involved with the acquisition and exhibition of a

wide range of decorative arts objects. He corresponded extensively with collectors and dealers

who owned items of interest to the Museum, and assessed objects under consideration by the

Purchasing Committee of the Board of Trustees. Towards the end of his tenure, he worked

intensively on the acquisition of colonial American interiors and objects intended for exhibition

in the Museum’s planned American Wing. Shortly after leaving the Metropolitan, Friedley drew a

set of architectural plans for the proposed American Wing, but they were never used.

In 1918, Friedley served in the U.S. Army as a member of the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal

Corps (renamed in May 1918 the Division of Military Aeronautics) painting camouflage on war

planes. During the 1920s he spent time in Europe as a portrait painter. He eventually returned to

the United States and settled in Newport, Rhode Island, where he continued his career as a

portrait painter and muralist. He was commissioned to paint the interiors of the Memorial Chapel

at the Seaman’s Church Institute of Newport in 1930. Friedley died in a car accident in March of

1938 at the age of fifty. Memorial exhibitions of his artwork were held at the John Herron Art

Institute (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art) in November 1938 and at the Walker Galleries in

New York City in early 1939.

http://www.libmma.org/digital_files/archives/Durr_Friedley_records_b1717476.pdf I.S. 12/14/2017