FREILICHER'S LANDSCAPE

FREILICHER’S LANDSCAPE

by Cynthia Goldstein

View Over Mecox (Yellow Wall)

A lovely landscape seen through a window? Look again—and again. Oh, it’s a painting of a painting! Leaning against a yellow wall is a large painting. Broad areas of violet, blue, green and gold represent sky, sea, grass, trees.  All is calm. It is summer. In the foreground, echoing the shapes and colors of the landscape, is a table holding a plant. This is the world of Jane Freilicher. The painting is View over Mecox (Yellow Wall) (99.1).

Born in Brooklyn in 1924, daughter of a linguist father and a pianist mother, Freilicher never strayed far from her roots.  She earned her Bachelor of Art degree from Brooklyn College and an MA from Teachers’ College at Columbia University.

In addition to her academic studies, she studied with Hans Hofmann.  About her experience with the painter she said, “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 experimenting with abstract expressionism, Freilicher remained figurative in her work. “In the ‘50s,” she said, “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…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 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.”

And what is Freilicher’s “homespun environment”? Her landscapes reflect the atmosphere and colors that she can see close to her summer studio in Water Mill, near Mecox Bay, at the eastern tip of Long Island.  Many of her paintings are framed by a window looking out on the landscape.

When America was young, history paintings and portraits were highly prized.  Fields and forests were not considered important artistic subjects.  When those fields and forests began to disappear in the nineteeneth century, painters celebrated America as an earthly Paradise, a virgin, unspoiled land. Thomas Cole (1801-1848), father of American landscapes, said “Where once there was beauty, there now is barrenness.  We are still in Eden—the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”  He wrote in 1841, lamenting the destruction of trees, “Our doom is near.  We feed ten thousand fires…the woodland growth of centuries is consumed.” He later wrote, “If I live to be old enough, I may sit down under some bush—the last left in the utilitarian world—and feel thankful that intellect in its march has spared one vestige of the ancient forest for me to die by.”   Who bought Cole’s

paintings? Many were people living in crowded cities who had grown up in the country and were nostalgic for the natural beauty he portrayed.           

These landscapes, uninhabited and limitless in the nineteenth century, have now been replaced by evidence of people living on the land: a bridge, a fence, a house—or a window frame.

                                              

But in View over Mecox (Yellow Wall) Jane Freilicher chose to paint not a scene seen through a window, but a painting of a painting of her much-loved landscape.

Look again—and again.

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Other comments on Freilicher’s works:

Jane Freilicher, a longtime resident of Long Island, 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…”

                         David Shirley, New York Times, 9/21/80

“…the landscape of Long Island has come to resemble a Freilicher painting…a Freilicher landscape has the ability to alter our perception of what we see…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.”

                          Amei Wallach, Newsday, 9/14/86

“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 than Jane Freilicher.  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.”

                    Michael Brenson, New York Times, 9/21/86   

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Wolf Kahn (MAG Evening Glow), Neil Welliver (MAG Dead Pine), and Jane Freilicher all paint familiar places—their own environments.  Welliver paints his beloved Maine woods. Wolf Kahn, who also studied with Hans Hofmann, paints the area of Vermont where he lives.  While his subject might be a field or trees, it is his color which defines his landscapes.  Kahn said, ‘I try to keep alive a traditional landscape spirit in the face of the most outrageous colors.”

Source: Curatorial files, Architectural Digest 6/96;  “Artwork of the ‘80s” Collections of the Castellani Art Museum