Plights of Stardom,
1935
Lithograph with color block, edition of 75

Museum Purchase
1982.15.21

Freeman was a kind of journalist of printmaking, with a Whitmanesque sympathy for the American scene and a touch of undeceived kindly satire. His movie-star literally struggles in the anxious nets of the image-making process, much as Virtue herself struggles against opposing forces in Andreani's Allegory. Is power a question of controlling one's own image, be it in an allegorical print or in the newer reproductive medium of the cinema? Prints were sources of power-making just like the current cinema. Do we gain true power through aquiescence to a medium?