Jane Frielicher is 87 years old. She has agreed to meet me at her gallery, Tibor de Nagy, who has been her dealer since 1954, rather than her studio. Her studio is in her home, and her husband is not well. I hope to get to the gallery early to see her show and her work before I meet her, but she is already waiting for me at the front desk, half an hour early. We go to the back of the gallery where there is an intimate space with her paintings, beautifully hung. Jane begins to talk to me about her work. She is extremely modest. Jane starts to tell me of her night painting which was so recently on her easel at home but is now hung in the gallery. She seemed delighted to see her work there; she said it was sort of amazing that people seem to want to look at her paintings, and that they like her work. She told me she studied with Hans Hoffman, an influential teacher.

Tibor de Nagy Gallery was quite a place “back in the day,” as they say. New York School poets like John Ashbury, Kenneth Koch, James Schyler, and Frank O’Hara all hung around the gallery, and some collaborated with the artists on prints and text. They were all great admirers of Jane’s work. At the gallery, she also met the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, with whom she developed a close friendship. Together, they painted the bucolic word of eastern Long Island, a fresh, clear place where artists could work. Porter and Freilicher both used the landscape as a motif in their paintings, with family members and friends naturally milling about, reading , painting, sleeping. In 1954, Porter painted a double portrait of his wife, Anne, reading and Jane painting in the lush Long Island landscape. Neither sitter is paying him much attention, but the figures sit well in the composition. Another of Porter’s Long Island pastorals, from 1967, is of Jane and her daughter, Elizabeth, when she was just a small child. Here, Jane is sitting and looking directly at her portraitist; she is wearing a short, lilac-colored dress with a pattern on it, and little Elizabeth is wearing red overalls with a pattern on it as well. It is a touching depiction of Mother and Child in the Long Island landscape. Jane owned this work and generously gave it to the Parrish Art Museum. It is not only a significant work of Porter’s but also a document of the lives and friendship of these two artists. Porter died in 1975 when he was 68. 

In this exhibition of Freilicher’s are eleven works, several from this year, and all but one are botanical still lifes set against the New York cityscape. Freilicher brings the planes of color from the background close and pushes the color of the botanicals in the foreground back to make them combine and flatten. This is Hoffman’s technique of “push and pull” which had a tremendous influence on artists of the New York School. Where Hoffman’s colors vibrate against one another, however, Freilicher’s colors sit softly in the same tonal range even as they playfully create spatial tensions. In a small (8 x 10 inches), a liquidy landscape from 2010, the greenish gray in the foreground recedes into coral and yellow and breathes upward into the twilight sky of a grayish blue that comes forward and flattens the picture.

In the paintings Freilicher made on Long Island, the horizon and clear, cloudless sky dominate the compositions. There is often a wonderful swatch of bright and clean cadmium yellow that rakes across the greenest of pastoral grass. Although nominally interiors and landscapes, the true subject of Freilicher’s paintings is color and the quiet but very compelling dramas it can enact.