Henri Friedlaender donated the works in this collection to Luther College after Luther Professor Ruth Kath traveled to Israel in 1989 to interview him. They talked for more than eighteen hours and developed a lasting friendship that extended to the college. Friedlaender donated several works to the Fine Arts Collection including four oil paintings, four etchings and a woodcut by Frans Wildenhain; an oil painting by Charles Crodel; and two crayon sketches by his sister, Marguerite Wildenhain. Later he donated a porcelain cup and saucer designed by Marguerite Wildenhain as a prototype for a German airlines beverage service. Although the airline never adopted the prototype, it was reproduced in 2000 by the Meissen manufacturing company as a gift for guests during the opening of the intercontinental runway at the Leipzig/Halle Airport on March 24, 2000.

Information on Henri Friedlaender
Friedlaender was a well-known book designer and pioneer typographer. The brother of ceramic artist Marguerite (Friedlaender) Wildenhain, Henri was born in Lyon, France in 1904. When he was six years old, his family moved to Berlin, Germany. In 1925, he began to study calligraphy and printing at the Academy of Graphic Art and Book Design in Leipzig, but fled Germany in the face of rising anti-Semitism in 1932. He moved to The Hague, Netherlands, to work as art director at the Mouton Publishing House. In 1936, Friedlaender expanded his professional interests into education, teaching calligraphy and typography in Amsterdam. Following the Nazi invasion of Holland in 1940, Henri hid in the attic of his house for 1,018 days. He was kept alive by his wife, Maria (he was Jewish, she was not) who gave him food through a small hole in the attic. Much of his existing work was buried in the backyard to keep it from the Nazis. He occupied his time in hiding by continuing to work on the creation of a modern Hebrew
alphabet, something he had started years before. Their only child, Hanna, was born in 1949, and the following year the family relocated to Israel where Henri headed the Hadassah-Brandeis Apprentice School of Printing in Jerusalem. Finally, in 1958, after 27 years of development and setbacks, he completed the first modern Hebrew typeface, "Hebrew Hadassah." In 1971, Henri Friedlaender received the Gutenberg Prize, the highest award given to typographers. Friedlaender died in 1996.