Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Jane Freilicher
American (b. 1924)
ON THE EDGE OF SOUTH HAMPTON
(1987)
pastel on paper
21" x 26"
STYLE: landscape ©Jane Freilicher

This representational painter is prominent for her landscapes, cityscapes, interiors and still-lifes — often the genres are combined. In her work she has developed her own highly personal idiom through absorbing Post-Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist influences. Eschewing the art fashions of the 80s, Freilicher's quiet and assured paintings give pleasure, but are not without certain conceptual underpinnings. For example, many of her paintings are framed by a window looking out on the depicted landscape. Through this means, Freilicher reminds the viewer of the modern mediations of the idealized natural landscape, which, in the 19th century, would never have been shown with such interference. It also provides a formal problem to be solved by the painter.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

David Shirey, NYTimes, 9/21/80
"...Jane Freilicher, who has become one of the Island's most celebrated still-life and landscape artists. A longtime resident of the Island [Long], the artist knows her subjects of fields, trees and strips of land right down to the details of twigs and grass and flowers. That knowledge and affinity emerge from the aura of the works, not from details, which she almost seems to abhor. She prefers to omit rather than include in her works..."

Gerrit Henry, ARTnews, 1/85
"The tangible evidence of Jane Freilicher's words is in the paintings she has been producing since the early 50s—landscapes viewed through the large windows of her summer home in Water Mill, Long Island...Freilicher has always been a committed realist, but, like much Action Painting, hers is about the act of painting—with the subject matter there to keep the artist from straying too far afield from reality...Freilicher's lyrical brand of realism was well received by many in the ranks of the New York School back in the 1950s...Today, however, Freilicher has won increasing stature as one of our best painterly realists...Freilicher grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a father who was a linguist and a mother who was a talented pianist...Far more satisfying was the time she spent at Hans Hoffman's schools in Manhattan and Provincetown...Hofmann's students worked with models, but were required to interpret them along abstract lines, according to Freilicher, 'trying to figure it out in terms of planes—a Cubist orientation.' Although she considers the experience pivotal, as soon as she left Hofmann's she began to paint figuratively. And, of course, since it was the 1950s, Freilicher also experimented with Abstract Expressionism. But she says she felt a closer tie to French painting, to Matisse and Bonnard...Nonetheless, Hofmann did have an influence. 'He gave you a sense of working over the whole surface, orchestrating the painting so you got a kind of energy going,' says Freilicher. 'I never think of Hofmann's famous 'push-pull' consciously, but I always have a sense of the surface of the painting as something alive and vibrant.'...Despite experimentation, Freilicher's work has remained figurative, which hasn't always been easy. In the 50s, she says, 'there was a lot of pressure to be abstract; it was the thing to be, and there were a lot of people who thought it was a cop-out or a weakness not to paint abstractly...To this day, figurative painters are in a different category. But I felt that I was doing something that was natural to me...I had to have something to relate to besides myself...I'm not after a fixed, static "real thing," whatever that is. I'm quite willing to sacrifice fidelity to the subject to the vitality of the image, a sensation of the quick, lively blur of reality as it is apprehended rather than analyzed. I like to work on that borderline—opulent beauty in a homespun environment.' Frank O'Hara poem, "To Jane (In Imitation of Coleridge)" She half encloses worlds in hr eyes, She moves as the wind is said to blow, She watches motions of the skies As if she were everywhere to go. She is not dangerous or rare, Adventure precedes her like a train; Her beauty is general, as sun and air Are secretly near, like Jane.
Amei Wallach, Newsday, 9/14/86
"...[for her aficionados] the landscape of Long Island has come to resemble a Freilicher painting. Like the best of the genre—like a Courbet wave or a sundappled Fairfield Porter lawn—a Freilicher landscape has the ability to alter our perception of what we see. Freilicher has for the past three decades reigned as something of a doyenne of the realist tradition as it is practiced in the second half of the 20th Century...The flowers—there are almost always flowers in a Freilicher painting—domesticate the scene, like a cat on a windowsill or Bach on the radio...She is not a landscape painter. She is a still life painter who loves paint in all its idiosyncrasies...There's a headlong urgency to the way she applies the paint, which, over the years, became more circumspect and serene. She has never abandoned her brushy, expressionist attack...What must happen in a Freilicher painting is light. She calls it 'voltage' when she keys up the color so the painting just doesn't describe light, it glows."

Michael Brenson, NYTimes, 9/21/86
"Of all the contemporary artists who have been working to sustain the traditions of still life and landscape painting, none may be more respected and influential that Jane Freilicher. She brings to her paintings of her immediate environment a sensibility shaped by modernist thinking in the decade after World War II. And while her commitment to the visual world and faith in easel painting may not seem to have much to say to the brave new art world of the 1980s, younger artists, are, in fact, very aware of her achievement...she paints from the inside out. She begins not with a theory or program but rather with a mood or feeling...A painting is complete not so much when everything is in place as when she feels that the emotion or response that inspired the painting has been revealed...Freilicher's work is built around contrasts. There may be a tension between a bouquet of flowers inside a studio and wildflowers outside...If Freilicher cares passionately about her Long Island landscape, she still keeps herself at a distance from it. We invariably look at a scene through a window. As lush and seductive as grass and brush may be, we almost never feel that we could plunge into it. As much as her paintings may appeal to the body, they trust only the eye. The modernist detachment may be a response to a profound awareness of change. Anyone fully committed to the moment knows that each moment is different. The flowers Freilicher most identifies with are cut flowers, whose time is brief. The artist is constantly rounding off the landscape, giving it the shape not only of a globe, or of an eye, but of a clock...If Freilicher's celebration of painting and light is not quite a festival, it is because her work consistently touches something big, but prefers to remain small."