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

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.

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."

In Mixed Flowers (2003) the formal groundwork is not geometric, but comes from the natural shapes of leaves and flowers. The clopping removes from view ally sense of table or other support for the vase, which is itself indicated only by a murky lavender area at the bottom of the work. The background is a generalized "room tone," perhaps indicating dusk or early evening. Surfaces are not slavishly evinced, but the colors feel precise and, along with the vegetal forms, make the flowers at once dreamlike and real. This realistic dreaminess can put one in mind of Odilon Redon's bouquets, nowhere more strongly than in the oil-on-paper Flora I (2003), whose blooms glow provocatively in a warm ground.

Nasturtiums and Petunias I (2003), a large work, is somewhat disconcerting. Three flowerpots rest on an ovoid surface, perhaps a ceramic tray or table top whose legs have vanished. Further complicating the scene, the even ground surrounding this support is indeterminately located in space. Is that gray-green ground a wall, or a floor, leading up to a series of curved spines for a skylight or canopy? We do know for certain that we see the city through these spines, but the rooftops, even more nebulous than those in South of Fourteenth Street, offer us little descriptive certainty. What is most emphatic is a sense of the flowers themselves, their colors and shapes. Even the flowers' supports are mysterious; the blossoms make an aleatory dance across the canvas, as their snaking stems are minimized.

In several paintings, broad areas of color serve formal and emotional purposes. There is an appealing sense that color weights typical of certain 1950s abstractions have been revalidated in a different time and context. In Mallows and Trumpetvine (2003), broad swaths of blue and at least five earthy tans compose a setting whose arbitrariness, signaled by the way the paint is allowed to transgress presumed color borders, in no way compromises the domestic feeling of the situation. Similarly, Flowers on Blue (2003) is centered by a bold hart zontal streak, separating distant buildings from a nearby floral arrangement. The streak has the divisive effect of a river, and if we relax our consciousness, it can read as one, despite the fact that the buildings rise abruptly from it, and, more to the point, that this putative river breaks off at its bottom edge into brushwork that clearly asserts its nature as paint.

One of the paintings is appropriately titled My Cubism (2004), as several of these new city pieces are primarily two-dimensional "constructions" with different elements jostling each other for space. "The cityscapes are not slaves to nature," Freilicher affirms. "I'll start in a compulsive way. Sometimes, something far off will appeal to me. I put it in, then I realize it's too big to be that far away." In both the cityscapes and the flower paintings, an almost shocking liberty with facts is apparent. As the artist explains, "I find I will invent things: there will be an area of the painting that needs something, and I'll make up something."

Freilicher is known for the fixity, of her settings, and for the paucity of human figures in them. She paints almost exclusively in her studios; even in the country she doesn't venture out in the open air as much as she once did. Part of this discipline is about seeing the same thing differently; part is about becoming sensitive to the differences small changes can make. Plants and landscape change from year to year, and there are other developments. "The space is curtailed by some other person's landscaping," as Freilicher diplomatically puts it. "That sets up a certain amount of variety I don't have to invent. But I find I can work within the constrictions. Sometimes it's a good thing." Even a nearby renovation, with its concomitant construction site, made it into a painting.

Nasturtiums in a Bowl (2003) is affecting for placing its flowers in a realistic light, and yet this plant seems to float out over the city, drawing the viewer with it. Even in this clear daylit work, a sense of reverie persists, intimating not only French ideas in poetry and music, but also the reverie of an older person, looking at the world, remembering childhood and dreaming again.

In the seasoned experience of certain artists, one can observe a progression from youth--in which the facts of the artist's esthetic may need to be determined with precision, hard lines and definition--to a maturity that allows the artist ever greater freedom in drawing and touch. It is not necessarily a move toward abstraction, or not only that. It is also a rediscover, of a long-lost state of grace, a carefreeness, perhaps.

John Ashbery once called a Freilicher landscape "Baudelairean," and Kenneth Koch was bowled over by her spontaneous recitation of Baudelaire's poems, but Freilicher's work also makes me think of Mallarme. It is as if the rhythms and tones, as in Mallarme's poems, are more important than the variety of earthly existence.

"Jane Freilicher: Recent Work" appeared at Tiber de Nagy Gallery, New York [Mar. 18-Apr. 24].

Vincent Kutz is a New York-based poet and critic.

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