Jane Wilson, who died January 13 aged 90, will be remembered for majestic, multilayered, shimmering paintings of land, sea and sky inspired by the coastal topography and weather of the East End of Long Island.

Her paintings are a testament to a lifelong engagement with the history and substance of painting, with its potential to simultaneously reflect the world and make a universe entirely of its own. Every inch of her canvases is oxygenated and alive, evoking the experience of sensing undercurrents beneath the surface of a still pond. In Time Change (2011), for instance, Wilson’s characteristic low horizon line anchors the canvas, and we can perceive what she described as “looking for the color behind the color.” Suffused with horizontal bands of peach and pink of varying widths and delicate facture, the painting rewards us for attentive looking, revealing a range of overtones of scumbled color that pulsates and recedes. In paintings that “aim for moments of strong sensation,” as she put it, Wilson belongs to a tradition of transcendental American landscape that includes Albert Pinkham Ryder, Martin Johnson Heade, and Joan Mitchell.

Born in 1924 on a family farm in Iowa, Wilson knew the sequences and consolations of a life lived close to the land. “Growing up on a farm…you lived at the bottom of a sea of weather,” she told landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. She attended the University of Iowa just as visiting artists such as Philip Guston were transforming the art department with the energy of the New York art world. In 1948, with an M.A. in painting, she married fellow student John Gruen, the writer and composer, and they moved to New York. Their daughter, Julia, was born 10 years later.

In 1952 Wilson became a founding member of the Hansa Gallery, one of several artist-run art galleries that opened in the early 1950s in New York City. Endowed with a striking, natural beauty that evoked Modigliani, and that endured to the end of her life, she supported herself as an artist by working as a fashion model. When a dealer told her that she wasn’t handling her career properly by modeling, she responded, “Well, tell people about my years in academia.”

Over the next several years she moved away from an early abstract style influenced by Gorky and others. “I found myself in one of those lucid moments that occurs every twenty years and I realized I wasn’t a second generation Abstract Expressionist,” she told writer Mimi Thompson. “I looked at the ingredients of what I was painting and felt an uncontrollable allegiance to subject matter, and to landscape in particular.”

In 1960, when she joined Tibor de Nagy, the Museum of Modern Art acquired her painting The Open Scene. She and John bought an old carriage house with a hayloft in Water Mill, Long Island, where they found themselves at the fulcrum of a community of artists, composers, and writers. The mercurial ocean light and expansive terrain that had drawn such predecessors as Thomas Moran gave Wilson a mutable subject that she would address for the next forty years. The Water Mill house became a Long Island Rue de Fleurus — a spirited gathering place for some the most important artists and intellectuals of the mid-20th century. A white wicker couch on the patio served as the set for Gruen’s group portraits, whose lively subjects remind me of the civic officers in Frans Hals’ banquet portraits — only tanned and happier — in their Lilly Pulitzer print sundresses and Ban-Lon polo shirts, holding cigarettes and iced beverages. John’s photographs document the halcyon days of camaraderie among creative friends, lovers (and rivals) including Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Stella Adler, Fairfield and Anne Porter, Frank O’Hara, Cornelia and Lukas Foss, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Miriam Shapiro, and Paul Brach. For a while the two Janes painted together — facing each other, each doing her own work — in a bedroom in a rented house on Flying Point Road. Also born in 1924, Freilicher died the month prior to Wilson.

I love Wilson’s deceptively simple titles; they are saturated with meaning, and never contain more than they need to. The titles have a sonic/rhythmic pulse as they play with figures of speech. Call it a Day, Electric Midnight, and Torrid Day signal movement, and sum up twenty-four hours of weather or demanding work in a few choice words.

I worked with Jane Wilson at the National Academy where she served as president from 1992-94 (she was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters). In 2011, at her first exhibition at DC Moore’s downtown space (she had joined the gallery in 1999) I asked her how she felt about seeing her paintings in the bright halogen light of a Chelsea venue. Straightening her back at this question she said, “Well, Rebecca, your paintings have to stand up in any light!” Jane was genuinely interested in my own work and we talked about the challenge of painting things that were fleeting — atmosphere, for example. Now, whenever I pass the Pine Barrens on the Long Island Expressway and turn off at Manorville toward the Montauk Highway, it is forever a Jane Wilson sky.

Rebecca Allan is a painter. She will be the subject of a solo exhibition, Fjord/Mountain/River, at the Herron School of Art at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, April 3–29, 2015. She is represented by Patricia McGrath in Bridgehampton.

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b. 1924, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2014, Manhattan, NY

Tribute by Thomas Nozkowski, 2014

Review by Franklin Einspruch, 2011

Review by Hearne Pardee, 2009

The Review Panel, with David Cohen, James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr, 2008

Review by Maureen Mullarkey, 2005

More information on the artist can be found at Tibor de Nagy

Full index of listings for “Jane Freilicher” at artcritical

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My favorite Freilicher paintings–I wrote about them once–were her extraordinary crosses of still-life and landscape.  It is one thing to turn a still-life into a landscape or even vice versa, but to create an image that maintains the integrity of both genres is something else again.  Jane’s beautiful hand makes it look easy but it is very hard to do. Try it.

The protagonists of these great paintings, a nasturtium and a city, say, or a peony and a salt marsh, have complex relationships. They bob and weave with and against each other, moving gently but with more than a touch of contained conflict. They punch as often as they caress.

These are courageous paintings suggesting that a button of color — a flower or a dab of paint – can make the world shake.

Jane Freilicher is my idea of an artist. Her long career, her endless invention, her intelligence, her attention to the job at hand, her integrity – and all her wonderful paintings, which is what we have left now.

Her luminous color–her exemplary life.

From artcritical’s calendar for December 12, 2014:

Presenting Jane: 90th Birthday Celebration for Jane Freilicher

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March 10 to June 3, 2011 (extended from originally advertised dates)
724 Fifth Ave, between 56th and 57th streets
New York City,  212 262 5050

Jane Freilicher commands unalloyed reverence from fellow painters. I learned from a gallery director at Tibor de Nagy, for instance, that Thomas Nozkowski, whose work featured in their recently concluded “Object/Image” show, expressed elation at being exhibited alongside her. Any decent painter with a lick of sense would. As one of the last true scions of Giorgio Morandi, she combines a probing touch with a keen color sense to produce paintings of visceral power out of all proportion to the delicacy and limits of her subject: namely, as it has been for decades, still lifes set up in front of a window.

One of the delights of “Jane Freilicher: Paintings and Prints” is that some of the works were finished mere weeks ago. Bouquets, an especially Morandian composition with vases of flowers against a shadowy background, doesn’t even have a frame on it. The most intense hues in the painting appear in the chalky yellow flowers in an ocher vase in the foreground, followed by an unidentifiable blossom, a puffball of subverted pink, behind it. Besides those, there are only variations of silvery gray, earth yellow, and smoky ultramarine. But despite the piece’s undeniable neutrality, it feels saturated. (The spirit of Matisse’s French Window at Collioure infuses it.) This is the mark of a master colorist. Layers build up in one thin application of oil over another, but the final result is not a stratum so much as an authoritative burnishing of atmosphere, softly adjusted a quarter-inch at a time.

Window, also from 2011, works a higher key with equal effectiveness. Probably the most overtly Cubist work in the exhibition, the vases of flowers divide the windowsill into vase-size units, turning the lower quarter of the painting into an evocative abstraction. The windowsill itself splits into four pieces without feeling the least bit disjointed, such is the artist’s gentleness. The window frame is gone, somewhere beyond the edges of the 32 x 32 inch canvas, freeing the uncontained cityscape of Manhattan to rise up as ghosts colored rose, dust, and sand. Repetitions of pink and yellow ochre between the still life and the buildings cause them to pervade each other.  The sky is at once blue and gray, a perfect capturing of the often unsure mid-Atlantic weather.

This leads us to Study in Blue and Gray, also 2011. Comparison between cityscapes shows her rearranging the architecture at will, this time into rectangular sections of undifferentiated depth, a quilt of neutrals tilting towards moss, mustard, and terracotta. A plangent blue vase filled with white blooms anchors the painting with its sharpness. An accompanying gray vase of unassuming lavender wildflowers seems like it would be content to disappear. They are contrasting characters. Blue and gray tie the still life to the sky overhead and lend the city between them marked warmth. A restrained light seems to be coming from everywhere at once.

Two color lithographs from 2010 and 2011 (although the images derive from earlier paintings) are in the exhibition, and my feelings about them remain mixed. Printmaking, in this case, seems to be forcing clarity upon an artist better suited to making a patchwork of indecision, as Picasso famously quipped about Bonnard. But Light Blue Above (2010), in which two vases of flowers have been positioned on the grass some ways off from a Long Island waterway, is a pleasure, and its flattening of Freilicher’s infinitely varied touch has a charm of its own.

I have a copy of a 1986 monograph for a Freilicher exhibition that originated at the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. In one essay, John Ashbery wrote, “The artists of the world can be divided into two groups: those who organize and premeditate, and those who accept the tentative, the whatever happens along. And though neither method is inherently superior, and one must always proceed by cases, I probably prefer more works of art that fall in the latter category.” I would go further, and say that some achievements of art lie out of reach of premeditation. Nothing except an intuited search, undertaken for emotional reasons, resolved when the unforeseen has been discovered and recorded, will produce work of this sublimity.

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To a follower of Jane Freilicher’s work, her new show at Tibor de Nagy is something like the renewal of a long-term domestic relationship; there are the familiar views, the repertoire of flowers and objects. That the eighteen works in this show span over forty years raises questions on the process of ageing, on the value of spending so many years on the same motifs. To sustain such an involvement might be considered an accomplishment in itself – or, to some critics, proof of the inherent conservatism of painting, a medium out of step with rapidly changing times.

Whatever the answers to these larger questions, the show encourages us to reflect on Freilicher’s origins among the painters and poets that emerged in the 1950s, and to situate her development under the light our contemporary context brings to bear. One imagines her early, spontaneous studies of the Long Island landscape in terms of the mercurial, collage-like poems of Frank O’Hara, immediate and improvisational. But where he often shifts focus, in response to the abrupt encounters of urban life, it seems as though one incidental encounter – with the window view from her studio in Water Mill – has become prolonged for Freilicher into a lifetime engagement. (Or two, considering the equal importance of the view from her studio in New York.)

But it’s O’Hara’s openness to the inspiration of each new day that sustains the remarkable freshness of Freilicher’s prolonged involvement, along with the other abiding influence of Pierre Bonnard, whose concurrent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum – like one of O’Hara’s chance encounters on the street – sets Freilicher ‘s paintings freshly in the French artist’s context.  Leland Bell, another painter who emerged from Freilicher’s milieu, liked to speak of the “violence” of Bonnard, referring to his abrupt juxtapositions of objects and spaces. His window views, merging domestic interiors and landscapes, certainly serve as models for Freilicher’s own juxtapositions, especially in the way that the table by the window serves as a stage, on which bouquets and other objects are injected into the frame-within–a-frame of the painting.

Freilicher’s compositions are admittedly more self-consciously artistic than Bonnard’s informal configurations of flowers, food, and figures – understandable enough in an American’s embrace of a European model. The distinctive American spaces out her window – the flatness of Long Island or the vertical density of New York – also impose constraints. In a 1952 review, Fairfield Porter, attuned to the struggles of American artists, commended Freilicher’s search for “first principles”, and her “deep affection for all bumbling things”. Inspired by the abruptness of Bonnard, Freilicher finds ongoing support in O’Hara’s diaristic improvisations for her own daily engagement with all that‘s unruly or monotonous in what’s before her; she insists on the flat Long Island horizon as a matter of principle, recording in works like Afternoon in October(1973) what could seem tedious variations in its expanse with easeful, inspired economy and, as Porter puts it, “never a hint of pedantry”.

Freilicher’s work becomes tighter over time, but the spirit of chance encounter remains, as inSummer Afternoon (1987) with its telephone, or From the Studio (1989-91), with its swimming pool ironically placed behind a small painting of a nude. The most recent works included here, most notably Yellow (2009), return to the city and show a growing integration of the view and the table, a tendency to seek out simple forms and related colors that impose an enhanced overall harmony. Details seem less important – perhaps her attention flags, or perhaps her painting simply tends ever more strongly towards those “first principles” that Porter discerned in 1952.

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February 8, 2008 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr joined David Cohen to review Ellen Berkenbilt at Anton Kern, Katy Grannan at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 Freemans, Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy, William Kentridge at Marian Goodman and Chris Martin at Michell-Innes & Nash.

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January 13 – February 12, 2005

Refinement is in such short supply that I feel ungrateful to be less than wholehearted about Jane Freilicher’s show at Tibor de Nagy. Any reservation seems a sin against civility, like kicking the Queen Mother’s corgies.

But disappointment sets in when you realize that, among all the delicious work in this retrospective, much of its vitality was accomplished early on. After the Abstract Expressionist juggernaut subsided, complacency set in. Work began to coast on its own prettiness, not so much living painting as a safe product for clientele anxious to display fine breeding and correct feeling.

This exhibition coincides with the publication of “Jane Freilicher,” a handsome valentine from Abrams with mash notes from Klaus Kertess, John Ashberry and Thomas Nozkowski. Illustrations from the 1950s and 60s indicate the excitement of representational painting in those decades, when it was not safe and went against the grain of the moment. That was the ground of Ms. Freilicher’s well-earned reputation.

“The Painting Table” (1954) and “Early New York Evening” (1954) build on a delightful counterpoint of light and dark tones that slowly leeches out of her work, displaced–not always, but often enough–by a mannered placidity. You see the difference immediately in the pairing of the vivacious “Still Life with Calendulas” (1955) next to “The Sun Breaks Through” (1991). The dynamic composition, dramatic color and Matissean patterning of the older painting knocks flat the newer one with its formulaic vase of flowers in front of a meadow viewed contentedly through a window, all politesse and no punch.

Look carefully at the small “Study for Winter” (1997), tucked in a corridor off the main gallery. Vibrantly handled, it is a jewel of observation and painterly lucidity that trumps canvases 8 times its size. Ms. Freilicher is a splendid painter when she is not playing safer than she needs to.

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Part I: May 23- July 18, 2004
Part II: July 25- September 12, 2004

This summer’s exhibition at the Parrish had a simple premise: to survey recent work by artists who live and work at least part of the time on the eastern end of Long Island. Figural imagery abounded: painted, photographed or painted but derived from photographs. In the entire 2-part exhibition 29 out of 44 artists fall into one of these categories. There were also several artists’ choice segments. Part 1 had a section selected by Elizabeth Peyton, which brought historical painters of eastern long island into the show, including Fairfield Porter and William Merritt Chase.

Because of this, Fairfield Porter’s beautiful, muffled portrait of John MacWhinnie inadvertently dominates Part 1. Though not photo-based painter, Porter absorbed the downbeat ambience of the box brownie snapshot, a standard image-maker in the fifties and early sixties. The MacWhinnie portrait looks back to the wan interiors of Vuillard and forward to the painterly photographs of William Eggleston. Peyton, represented by a landscape and a portrait, seems weak in comparison to Porter but Porter may have looked a little underdone at first, too. In fact, Peyton’s work, like Porter’s, reveals itself slowly. It is 2 weeks later as I write this and I can still clearly recall her landscape painting. That is the best test I know. It is made up of few marks, but they are amazingly deft ones. Peyton avoids the ‘Wow’. This may be the only job left for painting: to be unassuming and slowly establish a permanent intimacy.

Jessica Craig-Martin’s tough, intelligent photograph, “Parrish Museum Benefit, Southampton,” (2001) has a charm that belies its large scale, and is a reminder of Porter’s penchant for using just-after-dinner tables laden with flowers as a motif.

On a Saturday evening in July the writer and curator Klaus Kertess interviewed painter Jane Freilicher as part of the lecture series that accompanied the exhibition. She strayed from talking about her own work, (she had a large landscape of a Hampton construction site in Part One) to supply a few choice art historical mini-portraits: “Hans Hofmann was a combination of Santa Claus and Richard Wagner”. The poet and critic Frank O’Hara loved the studios of artists, “He even loved to stretch paintings”. She characterized Fairfield Porter as being “terse”: “He would show up in your studio out of nowhere and not say anything, then make one short comment, like, ‘that’s one of your side-to-side paintings’ and then disappear.”

In Part Two there was an abundance of sensually direct paintings. Worthy works of sculpture and installation were also on display, but what was ultimately striking here was cross-criticism among the paintings.

Billy Sullivan’s “Sirpa Milk,” a painting copied from his own photograph, depicts a nude woman breakfasting on a bed in a hotel room. The painting is predominantly white, but discreet intensities of color provide the image with a subtle structure. Delicate smears of transparent yellow enjoin details, such as the place between the pancake and the plate on the room service tray, the creases in the frame on the wall and the tuck of the towel around the neck of the nude figure. Sullivan’s decorative freedom, so amply present in this work, contrasts with the murky photo-based paintings exhibited by Chuck Close and Eric Fischl. These paintings underline the pitfalls in maintaining the “look” of the photograph to resolve the image.

Jane Wilson’s “Clouded Midnight,” depicting a brooding night sky, reveals, upon close examination, an electric orange underneath the dominant indigo clouds. Mary Heilman installed a polychrome painting with two chairs of her own design, rhyming one color from the painting with a color used in the objects. Heilman’s ensemble hit a note between seriousness and whimsy, casual décor and reductive aesthetics. Another kind of rhyming took place in the painting, “Everything,” by David Salle, where a collection of common objects, such as hats, flowers and fabric, established visual correspondences via similarities in brushstrokes and appearances. The painting was a ruminative essay of complex space, bright color and self-reflexive imagery.

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