Jane Freilicher's "The Painting Table"

Jane Freilicher, The Painting Table (1954)

Two recent reviews of the “Painters & Poets” show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery – Peter Schjeldahl’s “Artists and Writers” (The New Yorker, January 31, 2011) and Dan Chiasson’s “A Vanguard of Friends” (NYR Daily, February 26, 2011) - are endlessly stimulating. They radiate light in a number of directions. As Schjeldahl says in his piece, the de Nagy “amounted to a salon” for a circle of painters and poets that included Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Joan Mitchell, and Jane Freilicher. I’m a fan of most of these artists, especially Schuyler. My appreciation of Schuyler’s work goes back to a wonderful 1981 piece that Howard Moss, The New Yorker’s poetry editor from 1950 to 1987, wrote about it, entitled “Whatever Is Moving” (included in Moss’s 1986 collection Minor Monuments). Moss notes Schuyler’s interest in painting, saying that, “Painting is crucial in Schuyler’s case because it brings with it one of the essential components of his verse – light.” A few years ago, August Kleinzahler, in a review of a volume of Schuyler’s letters, said, “Schuyler’s finest poems are landscapes and interiors, paintings in language” (see “Living on Apple Crumble,” London Review of Books, November 17, 2005). Painting is a way of seeing, of course, and what I like about the de Nagy group is that they see, paint, and write “the whatever-happens-along.” This phrase is from John Ashbery’s essay “Jane Freilicher,” included in his great 1991 collection of art writings Reported Sightings. Freilicher’s The Painting Table is one of the key pieces in the de Nagy show. Both Schjeldahl and Chiasson mention it. Schjeldahl says:

Freilicher’s “The Painting Table” (1954) makes no pretense to mastery – it is awkwardly composed – but each of the represented studio details strikes the heart, through the eye, as a thing individually, intimately known. It shares a sense of cosmopolitan sophistication, as a quality soul-deep, with the poetry of Ashbery, O’Hara, and Schuyler.

Chiasson, in his piece, says:

Everything in this show requires close-up scrutiny of multi-faceted images, canvases with lots of small dramas and scattered events. This in itself is an aesthetic intervention at a moment when big canvases that made a single impression—think of Mark Rothko—were the rule and the vogue. But the Freilicher painting [The Painting Table], which is only about 26 by 40 inches in dimension, really depends on getting up so close that the one raised glob in its lower right quadrant, near the edge of the table it depicts, stands out. It looks as though she’s just squeezed the paint directly from the tube, the way Pollock sometimes did (an art historian friend of mine assures me there is no technical term for this method, and opines that “that’s why descriptions of Pollock are so pseudo-poetic”).

But the meaning here of paint-as-paint could not be more different than in Pollock’s ejaculations. Freilicher’s is a painting, after all, of a painting table. And that daub of white paint represents—well, it represents a daub of white paint, waiting on its palette for the tip of a brush. Which makes this perfectly representational picture in its weird way abstract, or at least what people often mean by abstract: a painting of painting, a closed loop that refuses external reference much more successfully than Pollock’s or de Kooning’s paintings, which, Rorschach-like, always suggest “real” things beyond themselves—landscapes, cityscapes, people.

Chiasson goes on to call that little daub of white paint in Freilicher’s The Painting Table “one of the great daubs of white paint in American art.”

Perhaps the best description of The Painting Table is contained in Ashbery’s “Jane Freilicher,” in which he says:

“The Painting Table” is a congeries of conflicting pictorial grammars. There is a gold paint can rendered with a mellow realism that suggests Dutch still-life painting, but in the background there is a reddish coffee can (Savarin?) that is crudely scumbled in, whose rim is an arbitrarily squeezed ellipse – one understands that this wasn’t the shape of the can, but that the painter decided on a whim that it would be this way for the purpose of the picture. Other objects on the table are painted with varying degrees of realism, some of them – the flattened tubes of paint and the blobs of pigment – hardly realistic at all. There is even a kind of humor in the way the pigment is painted. What better way than to just squeeze it out of the tube onto the flat surface of the canvas, the way it is in fact lying on the surface of the table, reality “standing in” for itself? But she doesn’t leave it entirely at that; there are places where she paints the image of the pigment too, so that one can’t be exactly sure where reality leaves off and illusion begins. The tabletop slants up, the way tabletops are known to do in art since Cézanne – but this seems not the result of any Expressionist urge to set things on edge but rather an acknowledgment that things sometimes look this way in the twentieth century, just as the gold tin can is allowed to have its way and be classical, since that is apparently what it wants. The tall, narrow blue can of turpentine accommodates itself politely to this exaggerated perspective, but the other objects aren’t sure they want to go along, and take all kinds of positions in connivance with and against each other. The surrounding room is barely indicated except for the white wall and a partly open window giving on flat darkness. (Is it that these objects have come to life at night, like toys in some boutique fantasque?) The result is a little anthology of ways of seeing, feeling and painting, with no suggestion that any one way is better than another. What is better than anything is the renewed realization that all kinds of things can and must exist side by side at any given moment, and that this is what life and creating are all about.

You can tell from the above passage that Ashbery admires the way The Painting Table is painted. Clearly, he’s studied it. When he concludes that “this is what life and creating are all about,” it’s tempting to say that he’s holding up The Painting Table as an embodiment of at least one element of his aesthetic – a democratic way of seeing things (“all kinds of things can and must exist side by side at any given moment”). Indeed, Helen Vendler has written a review of Ashbery’s A Worldly Country: New Poems titled “The Democratic Eye” (The New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007), in which she says, “nothing in ordinary life is alien to his democratic and comprehensive and indulgent eye.” Perhaps another way to describe the democratic nature of Ashbery’s poetry is to say that it’s Freilicher-like, thereby linking it to The Painting Table and Ashbery’s appreciation of it in his great essay “Jane Freilicher.”