Jane Freilicher, the deftly atmospheric figurative painter whose death at the age of 90 was announced yesterday by her New York gallery, Tibor de Nagy, was one of the artists I interviewed for a Mar. 7, 1993 piece in the NY Times “Arts & Leisure” section (no link available) on “older” artists (then in their 50s and 60s) who were well known but had fallen out of fashion.
What I wrote about her back then remained true:
Unlike many once trendy artists, Jane Freilicher has never been flavor of the month. “A lot of people who had flash turned out to be a flash in the pan,” said Ms. Freilicher, who defied ’60s trends by remaining stubbornly figurative in an age of abstraction. “They didn’t survive the absence of that notoriety. I never had it, so I don’t feel the lack of it.”
She prefers today’s profusion of styles to the orthodoxies of previous generations. “The fact that there have been so many trends gives one a sense of freedom: You can’t be everywhere,” said Ms. Freilicher, whose traditional landscapes and interiors, painted in Manhattan and in Water Mill, on eastern Long Island, have attracted a growing audience of admirers [I was one of them] and collectors. “When Abstract Expressionism was dominant, you could feel slightly like an outcast if you weren’t pushing ahead on that front.”
Still, she acknowledges that even in today’s pluralistic climate, her work “probably wouldn’t look right at the Whitney, where the emphasis is on the latest thing. It’s hard for curators who want to get a sexy show to say, ‘We’re going to show Jane Freilicher.'”
As it happens, Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum is “going to show Jane Freilicher” in what looks to be a pretty “sexy show”—Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler (Feb. 11-June 7). It’s an intriguing line-up of “artists from the 1950s through the present [who] work in a range of mediums, finding personal, social and political meaning in sheer, gorgeous materiality.”
As it happens, the Freilicher to be included in the Rose show is an uncharacteristic abstraction:
Here’s a quintessential Freilicher, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum (but not currently on view):
Frankenthaler, the Rose show’s fulcrum, was another of the artists I interviewed for the same NY Times article, and the Rose’s words about “finding…meaning in sheer, gorgeous materiality” would have resonated with her. To me, Frankenthaler had expressed her hopes for “a revival of…a search for truth and beauty.” In her more traditional, painterly way, Freilicher was on the same quest.
Ginia Bellafante‘s more recent NY Times piece, tied to Freilicher’s show last year at Tibor de Nagy—Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets—gives a sense of the close-knit creative community of which she was an essential part.