Art Chronicles: Jane Freilicher 1924 – 2014

I first became aware of Jane Freilicher through her presence in Frank O’Hara’s poetry: Interior (with Jane); Chez Jane; Jane Awake; To Jane, and in Imitation of Coleridge. I didn’t immediately know that she was a painter, one of several whom O’Hara befriended, supported, reviewed and who became poetic muses in his verse. Grace Hartigan – For Grace, after a Party – was another; as was, perhaps most famously, Joan Mitchell, in Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s.

Painter Among Poets was the title of Freilicher’s last, 2013, show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York; Poet Among Painters, the title of Marjorie Perloff’s  1977 critical biography of O’Hara. New York Poets: New York Painters. The Scene.

When she was eighteen, Jane Niederhoffer, as she was then, eloped with jazz pianist Jack Freilicher, whom she married and later divorced, having met, through him, the saxophonist Larry Rivers when both men were playing in the same band. Freilicher occupied herself during band rehearsals by sketching and painting and Rivers, interested in both Freilicher and her artistic talents, followed suit. It was the painter Nell Blaine who suggested the pair sign on to study with Hans Hoffmann at the Arts Students League of New York. That would have been in 1947.

During the next couple of years, she met O’Hara and the other leading poets in what came to be termed the New York School – Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery and, a little later, James Schuyler. All four men were familiar with the art scene, all, save for Koch, regularly wrote art criticism and reviews, and O’Hara was actually employed at the Museum of Modern Art. There is some small confusion over to which of them she sold her first painting, Ashbery or O’Hara.

By the early 1950s, she was fully immersed in the New York Scene and had met fellow artists Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler, all three of whom were attempting to negotiate a stylistic space for themselves amidst the often aggressively male Abstract Expressionism that was the predominant fashion at the time. Strongly influenced by the Bonnard exhibition at MOMA a few years previously, and aware also of the work of Vuillard and Matisse, Freilicher’s riposte to abstraction was a lyrical, light-diffused and vibrantly coloured series of still lives and landscapes that remained at the heart of her work from her first solo show at Tibor de Nagy in 1952 until her last.

Keeping out of fashion, she suggested, gave her the chance to have the freedom to fool around.

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 analysed. I like to work on that borderline – opulent beauty in a homespun environment.

She also said …

I suppose I think more in terms of colour than of line …

… a statement I used as an epigraph to my novel In a True Light, which is, in part, about the New York scene and Greenwich Village in the 50s, though the character of the painter in the novel is more like an amalgam of Mitchell and Frankenthaler than Freilicher herself.

And, finally, here are the last lines from a  poem by James Schuyler, Looking Forward to See Jane Real Soon.

Jane, among fresh lilacs in her room, watched
December, in brown with furs, turn on lights
until the city trembled like a tree
in which wind moves. And it was all for her.

 

 

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Art Chronicles: Helen Frankenthaler Again

 

Photo : Burt Glinn

Helen Frankenthaler, whose work is currently on show at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, was one of a relatively small number of women artists who managed to find a means of negotiating their own distinctive and successful art practice in the midst of what was, by and large, a male dominated New York art scene in the 1950s and 60s. Here she is, above and below, pictured with two other artists from that number – Joan Mitchell (left) and Grace Hartigan (right) – at an opening of her show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in March 1957.

Photo : Burt Glinn

And here are Frankenthaler and Hartigan again, hanging out at the Five Spot, a jazz club where Thelonious Monk famously played, and where the painter/musician Larry Rivers organised poetry & jazz events on Monday evenings, Monk’s night off.

Photo : Burt Glinn

That’s Frankenthaler on the left, in front of the sculptor, David Smith, while Hartigan is on the opposite side, across from the poet Frank O’Hara, with Larry Rivers on her right. O’Hara, who reviewed art shows for Art News and other magazines, worked at the Museum of Modern Art, first as an administrative assistant and later as a curator, and was a personal friend of many artists, including Jane Frielicher, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, to each of whom, at various times, he dedicated poems.

It was O’Hara who curated and wrote the catalogue essay for Frankenthaler’s first major show, Helen Frankenthaler Paintings, held at the Jewish Museum between January and March of 196o. This is part of what he had to say about her work …

Frankenthaler is a daring painter. She is willing to risk the big gesture, to employ huge formats so that her essentially intimate revelations may be more fully explored and delineated, appear in the hot light of day. She is willing to declare erotic and sentimental preoccupations full-scale and with full conviction. She has the ability to let a painting be beautiful, or graceful, or sullen and perfunctory, if these qualities are part of the force and clarity of the occasion.

Photo : Burt Glinn

Photo : Burt Glinn

 

 

Art Chronicles: Footnotes from Amsterdam

1.   Having had our visit to Amsterdam trimmed by one day thanks to the storm, a plan seemed necessary: mornings, museum or gallery; afternoons, wander, pither, shop, nap, as the mood dicates.

2.  Wednesday, the Rijks Museum: having prebooked and printed our etickets and arrived soon after opening, we had the huge central seventeenth century Gallery of Honour almost to ourselves – for the first 30 minutes, at least. Vermeer’s ‘The Milkmaid’, ‘The Love Letter’, ‘The Little Street’ & the marvellous ‘Woman Reading a Letter’; Rembrandt’s self-portaits, ‘The Jewish Bride’ and, with pride of place at the end of the gallery, ‘The Night Watch’. Privileged is how we feel.

3. Thursday, the Stedelijk Museum, like it’s companion at the opposite side of Museum Plein, also recently refurbished and extended. We’ve come to see Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde, but first there’s an absolutely wonderful survey of modern painting from its beginnings towards the end of the nineteenth century, through Mondrian – not surprisingly, a lot of excellent Mondrians – and early modernism through CoBrA to abstract expressionism and onwards – except that we don’t get very far onwards, partly due to proximity of the café and a frugal memory of breakfast, partly as I’ve fallen in love with a Jackson Pollock I can’t remember seeing before –  ‘Reflection of the Big Dipper’ – smaller than the majority of his drip-period paintings and featuring an unusually bright blue at its centre, very much a Joan Mitchell blue, in fact (and, co-incidentally, the blue of my daughter’s top, obvious when she stands in front of it, but I digress).

Restored by our time in the café, we head upstairs to the Malevich, which is nicely mounted and put together, including filmed excerpts from an opera for which he designed the costumes (think, Dr. Who Goes Constructivist), but with some 500 works in all, perhaps a tad too comprehensive. Plus, when we reach the climax of the exhibition, Malevich’s geometric abstract paintings, created some little time before abstraction was created, there’s some dissension in the ranks at how good/pleasurable they are. Not from me. Not, especially, from Sarah.

4. Thursday evening, dinner at Toscanini’s, an Italian restaurant that comes highly recommended and, for once, all of the recommendations are, if anything, less fulsome than they might be: a large room with an open kitchen at the far end; charming, friendly but not over-fussy staff; the food is magificent. We all agree, some of the best we’ve had anywhere. The mixed antipasti, for instance, instead of being the usual spread of cheeses, hams and salamis sprinkled with rocket, features – as well as some superb cheeses, hams and salamis – small plates of duck salad, tuna with tomatoes, ……. and thyme. And so it goes. My secondi of veal fillet with veal kidneys  and mushrooms is to die for. Superb.

5. Friday morning, FOAM, a museum of photography that never disappoints: on the top floor which holds the library and their new talent room, there is a brilliant exhibition, Handbook to The Stars, by Peter Puklus – who would have thought three wrapped cakes of soap on a bathroom window in Budapest could be so beautiful?

And the central show this time, quite brilliant, is Lee Friedlander’s America by Car.

After which we cross the canal to the Museum Van Loon, a house originally built in 1672 for the Van Loon family, who were one of the founders of the Dutch East India Company,  and now host to a contemporary art exhibition, Suspended Histories; each room holds furniture and objects from earlier periods, cleverly interspersed with newly-created works of art which connect with or comment on the house and the family’s history, in particular its links with – and exploitation of – former Dutch colonies.

Art Chronicles: Helen Frankenthaler

Along with Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, who has died at the age of 83, was one of a relatively small number of women artists who came to prominence in the male dominated New York art world of the 1950s. Loosely catagorised as second generation Abstract Expressionists, each had to find a style – and a space – within which their work could develop and grow. Hartigan, [below left, with Frankenthaler] without eschewing abstraction altogether, began to bring representational forms and figures into her work, to the point that she was later heralded [much against her wishes] as one of the progenitors of Pop Art. Mitchell – who along with Hartigan and Jane Freilicher, had been linked with the group of artists and writers closely associated with the poet Frank O’Hara – left New York for France, where the influence of Monet and the Impressionists on her work became increasingly visible.

Not unlike Mitchell, Frankenthaler was interested in combining landscape – as she saw it in the paintings of Cézanne and in the sketches and water colours she herself made when travelling – with abstraction. “I wanted,” she said, “to draw in with colour and shape the totally abstract memory of landscape.”

Her breakthrough came when, partly as a result of watching Jackson Pollock at work, she set her canvases, still unprimed, on or close to the floor, pouring thinned paint directly on to the canvas and allowing it to spread, while, to some degree, guiding its shape and flow. A mixture of accident and control, resulting in, as the poet and art critic James Schuyler described it, “chanced beauty.”

The first major painting to come from this method of staining, as it came to be called, was “Mountains and Sea”,[above]  which gave birth to the branch of Abstract Expressionism known as Colour Field Painting or Post-Painterly Abstraction.

Frankenthaler continued to paint and show her work until recently, Paper is Painting being the last of three exhibitions held at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London between 2000 and 2010.

Art Chronicles: Joan Mitchell

Took the train up to Edinburgh recently, just for the day, in order to visit the exhibition of Joan Mitchell’s work at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden. Okay, a longish way, not so far off ten hours in  total on the train, but it was a comfortable enough journey and, aside from window gazing (great views of the sea, quite stormy, from Berwick upon Tweed north), I managed quite a bit of reading – and, at least, unlike Jackson Brodie in When Will There Be Good News?, I was travelling in the right direction. Besides, not so very long ago (2002) I flew over to New York to see the major retrospective of Mitchell’s paintings at the Whitney, so this was nothing …

It says much about the position of woman artists internationally, both now and in the recent past, that this is the first solo museum showing of Joan Mitchell’s painting in Great Britain. Mitchell began painting in her home city of Chicago, lived briefly in Paris with her first husband, before moving to New York in the early 1950s amidst the tumult of early abstract expressionism. Encouraged by Willem de Kooning and the poet and art critic/curator Frank O’Hara, she seems to have succeeded to a significant extent in keeping her head above water in what must have been an intensely masculine, testosterone-fuelled environment. (By all accounts, she swore like a stevedore and could drink many men under the table) In 1957, her work was included, along with that of fellow women artists Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Jane Freilicher in an important group show at New York’s Jewish Museum, Artists of the New York School: Second Generation. But by 1959, she had moved to Paris along with her lover, the Canadian painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and France was where she spent most of the remainder of her life, until she died in 1992.

Landscape and nature were always, I think, an important element in her painting, an element which helped to give a structure to the abstraction, and living and working in France, she naturally took on the influence of such artists as Monet, Cezanne and Matisse. This influence is already clear in some of the earlier pieces in the Edinburgh exhibition, which, although small, gains greatly from its situation, the gallery’s high windows looking out towards the trees and shrubbery of the Botanical Garden outside. And there’s a full and persuasive review of the show by Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times.

If I had to choose one painter whose work I could live with to the exclusion of any other, Joan Mitchell would be the one.