I was saddened to hear of the death of
painter Jane Freilicher on December 10th, aged 90. She lived a long
life and had a successful, respected and established career, still working and
exhibiting at 89. Of course no artist ever retires, but it still took me aback
a little as I’m an admirer and fan of her paintings and have learned a great
deal from her and others of the so-called ‘New York School’ of painters and
poets that followed the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950’s and 1960’s. These
include painters Fairfield Porter. Larry Rivers and Alex Katz, photographer
Rudy Burkhart, and poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest.
Unlike the generation of AE artists before them, the painters of the New York
School returned to a representational form of image making but tried to
incorporate the language and grammar of abstract painting. This is what
distinguished them, and kicked the door open for so many representational
artists that have followed. Fairfield
Porter’s ‘Art In Its Own Terms’, a collection of his essays and art criticism,
a brilliant book that I’ve recently read, and must be the best art criticism
I’ve ever encountered, discusses in his writing on painting many of the
concerns these artists shared and gives a real insight into this period.
Untitled Abstract, oil on canvas, 1960, 60 x 60cms
Many of the surviving poets and painters
paid tribute to Freilicher in a memorial service in New York a few days after
her death, alongside a new generation of artists appreciative of her work. I’ve
read many of the tributes by artists and journalists, and decided to select a
review by her close friend poet John Ashbery of a
Freilicher show at New York's Fischbach Gallery, published in our May-June 1975 issue of ‘Art In America’. It seemed to describe really well many of the
values I have found in her work, and have influenced my own painting in the
last twelve years or so as I've fumbled around trying to develop something of a relevant language to depict the landscape of my own.
'Nightfall', 1968
To
mark the passing of painter Jane Freilicher (1924-2014):
‘Jane Freilicher showed paintings of the landscape outside her studio in Water
Mill, Long Island, along with still-lifes and views of the city from the
windows of her apartment in New York. Thus she is a painter of "what there
is there," in Kenneth Koch's phrase. The Long Island landscape is
beautiful, though not spectacularly so in reproduction, whether photographic or
painterly: its beauty is more a question of light and atmosphere, both
singularly pure and precise because of the nearby ocean. The land is flat,
though in the distance there are some discreet undulations which pass for
hills. The buildings, at least those the artist can see from her studio, are a
discreet mélange—old frame houses of the type that used to be called
"beautiful homes," less distinguished newer ones, and barns and
sheds. It is a landscape as good as any other, perhaps nicer than many, but the
artist is less interested in whatever picturesque qualities it may possess than
in its exemplariness. Somehow everything she touches is revealed as a
prototype, a sample of what there is there, though she would be the first to
disclaim any transcendental intent and is probably unaware of this quality in
her work. Obviously, she paints what she sees, but it happens that she sees a
lot.
Creation—fresh, unassuming, a little awkward still with some of its folds not
yet shaken out, is her subject; creation even in the joyous, homely sense
Milton imagined it:
Forth flourished thick the clust'ring vine, forth crept
The swelling gourd, up stood the corny reed
Embattled in her field: add the humble shrub
And bush with frizzled hair implicit.
Nothing
is made to look more important than it is, some things are even kidded a
little. One is tempted to ask the floppy Marsh
Bouquet: "And just who do you think you are?" When the houses down
the road or the tower of the Con Ed building seem to be giving themselves airs,
when the field outside the studio momentarily assumes a brightness that is out
of keeping with the glum cast of light in the sky, these discrepancies are
noted, but sympathetically. Everything is free to be itself, nothing is too
tentative or modest to be included in her factual but generous account of what
she sees.
In the landscapes,
the "interesting" part of the scenery—a bay, a line of trees, a roof
poking mysteriously out of the foliage—is usually in the distance, as is true
of most landscapes; the foreground may be occupied by some "frizzled"
shrubbery. That's the way the view is, but one can't help reading a kind of
moral order into the way the scale of things is managed: these are
"democratic vistas." In Potato
Truck, everything hinges on the truck, a tiny patch of man-made red
in the distance, organizing space like Stevens' jar; but what is closest and
biggest are some bushes. They are elaborated more thoroughly than anything else
in the picture perhaps just because of their shapelessness and their inability
to benefit very much from celebration by a poet or a naturalist. So they are
left in their frumpiness, looking unfinished despite the articulation lavished
on them. Nature is efficient but not always neat, and the romantic depths of
the painting, suavely and succinctly painted, seem to recognize the justice of
this and efface themselves before its logic. And two of the still-lifes, One Cat, Two Fish and Objects on a Table, are
miniature cosmogonies: all things in them co-exist and are allowed their
idiosyncrasies, as is subtly indicated by the varied handling of paint. The
cityscape outside has a Guardi-esque fluidity, but on the table things are less
easy: some objects (the loaf of bread, a branch of broccoli) are deftly
encompassed; others are allowed to appear as problematical, as recalcitrant to
easy solutions as they would have looked to Cézanne.
The swift transition from style to style is one of the most remarkable things
in Freilicher's painting. The denotative and connotative jostle each other,
with no fixed boundaries; a rough tangle of brushwork menaces a sleekly
realistic passage. A field as minutely painted as Ruysdael would have done it
leads to a cloud on the horizon which really isn't a cloud but a brushstroke.
"Non-representational" painting is always lurking in the background,
or the foreground for that matter, of an ostensibly straightforward account of
a landscape, and of course landscape is like that; the eye deals with some of
it and neglects the rest. Other painters have made the point, but in Jane
Freilicher's case the transitions are so gradual, the differences so close,
that her grammar of styles can easily go unnoticed. The viewer imagines he is
looking at an "objective" account of trees or a table top without realizing
that they have been dismantled and put back together again almost seamlessly.
It is only on closer inspection that the oddity, the purposeful inconsistencies
of tone, the fact that everything doesn't hang together quite as it should,
become apparent. By then one has accepted the anomalies as the norms that they
are. Her purpose in ruffling the surface, in injecting not her own note but
that of things, in showing up each element's poignant desire to make its own
point, to put itself across, to be accepted on its own terms, is to restore the
primitive calm that the world presumably had before anyone had looked at it, to
reinstate that higher naturalness which can only become visible with the help
of a little artifice. She succeeds both in recreating the innocent look things
presumably once had and reconciling it with the knowledge of them we have now’.
John Ashbery, 1975
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