Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman

Gallery shows of paintings by living artists tend to focus on the most recent years of production. A new show at Tibor de Nagy, however, turns the clock back almost 50 years to present Jane Freilicher’s first paintings of Watermill, Long Island, where she still works.Ms. Freilicher is known for verdant landscapes and New York cityscapes, framed by still lifes in windows. Her touch has always been loose, though she possesses a clarity akin to that of her friends Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter. Her early paintings, completed between 1959 and 1963, are more abstract than anything she has produced in recent years. Their slashing yet dreamy blues and greens melt into washes of fresh, luscious white. The exhibition begins with Ms. Freilicher’s landscape-based abstractions and ends with her more familiar trio of field, sea, and sky.On the occasion of the show, I spoke with Ms. Freilicher about her work and her years in Watermill, where painters and poets convened in the late days of Abstract Expressionism and the early years of Pop Art.Ms. Freilicher is casual and almost offhand when speaking about her paintings and her process.These paintings were done mostly from memory; many were completed in Manhattan, before her Watermill studio was built. She underplays her aesthetic decisions as random consequences of fate and the weather.“I’ve never encountered that kind of persistent weather that I remember from those few years when I first went out there,” she said. “Everything seemed to be kind of drenched in fog, and bits of landscape would somehow pierce the fog, so it was a kind of sensitivity training.”“I remember being overwhelmed by the aqueous light and the near obliteration of the horizon by fog.”In those days, Watermill was still quiet and undeveloped. “Because there weren’t many houses, you had long vistas of clouds and water and not much punctuation of structures,” she said. “So I had to create my own punctuation.”The “sensitivity training” the topography and atmosphere of Watermill occasioned is key. The challenge of composing a picture without readily available points of interest – vertical forms against horizontal fields of land and atmosphere – led Ms. Freilicher into the more amorphous land-sky relations of her early paintings.Her process of painting today is much different: “I might plunk down a number of vases, or some flowers, or some stuff, in a window, and add the window. I sketch around it, not really knowing what’s going to happen,” she said.“At a certain point, I have an idea, and then I have to resolve it. Sometimes the resolution is bumpy. It’s sort of like moving furniture in a room where you think you have it and then you find it’s all wrong.”The furniture metaphor is a useful way of thinking about the messy process of composition. In the paintings at Tibor de Nagy, the “furniture” being arranged is dabs and slashes of color. But in Ms. Freilicher’s later works, the forms are more recognizable still-life and landscape elements: “Something to sink my teeth into,” she said.Switching metaphors from furniture to food, Ms. Freilicher said: “These early paintings were like a dessert. And when I finished the dessert, I wanted to just go back to the beginning of the meal. They had a certain kind of creamy lilt to them and then I wanted to get down to the bone again.”It is somehow appropriate that even the titles of these early paintings are more poetic than literal. “The Mallow Gatherers” (1958) has no gatherers; still, Ms. Freilicher’s friend, the poet Kenneth Koch, insisted she call it such. These paintings take us back to a past of Long Island’s East End, before overdevelopment. Artistically, as well, they are completely of their time. White was used to overpaint. There is a submerging of forms a la Willem de Kooning and color squares akin to Esteban Vicente, both of whom were present on the scene.The scene was not unimportant. Ms. Freilicher recalls the “democratic aura” of the time with “a lot of fraternizing between older and younger painters, and parties on the beach in East Hampton.” One wonders if these dreamy, sensual, memory-based paintings will have an effect on Ms. Freilicher’s current work. She says it is too soon to tell.How does it feel to see her decadesold paintings on exhibition? “It’s very weird. Like waking up from a dream.”“Near the Sea: Paintings 1958-63,” an exhibition of Jane Freilicher’s works, is on view until April 15 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, 212-262-5050).

Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman

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