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Urban meditations: in her recent cityscapes and still lifes, painter Jane Freilicher displays a new liberty with the facts, making them the vehicle for reverie
Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Vincent Katz
One senses a state of grace affecting the recent paintings of Jane Freilicher, a selection of which was recently on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. This does not mean that their mood is unremittingly check. In fact, there is an overall equanimity to the paintings. Rather, it is the grace of knowing that she can do what she wants more easily now, that the desired effects, changeable though they may be, can be achieved through a harmony of eye, mind and hand. As usual, she works mainly with views from or settings in her two studios, one on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the other in Water Mill, Long Island. These vistas are chosen for their neutrality; despite their glamour and beauty, they do just happen to be there. This show included mainly urban scenes, with only two--an oceanscape and a view of a leafless tree against a winter field--identifiable as having country settings.
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Freilicher did her first mature work in the 1950s, during the ascendancy of the New York School of painting. With contemporaries Nell Blaine, Larry Rivers and others, she fashioned a genre of representational painting based on Abstract-Expressionist techniques. Freilicher painted works then that had an abstractionist's emphasis on planar tension and a free approach to paint handling. Her painting Burnett's Barn (1963) is a good example of this style. The farm buildings are clearly recognizable, but the edges of vegetation are loosely delineated, and the paint asserts its nature in the way it takes to the canvas. Not coincidentally, Blaine, Freilicher and Rivers all studied with Hans Hofmann. In the 1960s, Freilicher distinguished her painting from that of her forebears by choosing mundane scenes, devoid of Abstract Expressionism's heroic angst, and rendering them in a way that relied more and more on detailed depiction.
Delicacy has always been a hallmark of Freilicher's technique, but where in many paintings in the 1970s and 1980s she devoted considerable energy to including specific information drawn from nature, in her recent work, she seems less encumbered by that preoccupation. These new images--whether they are landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes or flowers--do not trumpet their semantic referentiality. Rather than consciously submitting to the scene she is painting, Freilicher allows her imagination to dominate the scene. Her current manner, though, is tempered by decades of observation and application. The new paintings are open in a different way than are her 1950s paintings; they are not expressing but meditating, and it seems that what they are meditating on is natural rhythms (including those one finds in urban contexts). Through this controlled, one could say devotional, work, Freilicher creates small paintings packed with multiple ramifications.
In her new work, paint is allowed to stain into the canvas, forms allowed to blur into one another. Edges are softened, sometimes indistinct. There is a hypnotic quality to these paintings that has an effect similar to that of Mondrian's studies of piers and shifting waters. Freilicher's emphasis, in this exhibition, on geometric forms drawn from buildings puts the paintings in a nonexpressionistic context.
One of the pleasures of Freilicher's work is its appropriate looseness. She knows just how much to bend a line or blend a tone so that the composition remains both a depiction and a satisfying complex of painted marks. This quality is present in the new work in stronger doses than has sometimes been the case. In a way, Freilicher is going back to some of her earliest painting roots. It is informative, for example, to compare Early New York Evening (1953-54) to South of Fourteenth Street (2003). The paint handling is similar, but the recent painting is more subtle tonally and more complicated in its composition. Its tone is set by a glow that is not the glow of the sun--the day is somber and overcast--nor yet the glow of filtered gray light, but the glow of the artist's pleasure in paint. The montage of building tops becomes like the sea, its gentle washing back and forth and in and out not the result of formal complexity, but rather an emanation from the surface itself, from the precision of almost evanescent areas of paint thinly laid on the canvass. The painting conveys an unusually real feeling of seeing, something mere depiction call never achieve.
The artist has been using staining for some time, both in her grounds and in the details of her pictures, and now it is the decisive element. She does not draw with charcoal, but starts right in with paint. As she explained recently, "I sometimes wipe in loosely brushed things; I might draw with pastel that I brush off." Where she used to use a Venetian red stain, now she might prepare a primed canvas with a raw sienna stain, or a dark green, or even black, which she then rubs out. "I find I don't like to start, on a white canvas anymore," she says. "It seems somehow raw to me. Having that color bathes the painting in a certain way."
