February 13 & 20, 2017, Issue

For me, the most interesting item in this week’s issue is Jane Wilson’s 1957 portrait of Jane Freilicher, illustrating Peter Schjeldahl’s “Goings On About Town” piece, “Down and In,” on NYU Grey Art Gallery’s “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965.” Seeing it, I was reminded of Freilicher’s great The Painting Table (1954), a painting that John Ashbery, in his Reported Sightings (1991), describes as “a little anthology of ways of seeing, feeling and painting, with no suggestion that any one way is better than another.” I’ve written about The Painting Table before (see here). It’s one of my touchstones.