January 25, 2021 Issue

Opening this week’s New Yorker, I was delighted to find a painting by Jane Freilicher, a beautiful red, pink, and green work called Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape), c.1990, illustrating Andrea K. Scott’s absorbing capsule review of Kasmin Gallery’s new exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World.” Freilicher’s The Painting Table (1954) is one of this blog’s touchstones (see here). Scott writes,

For more than fifty years, as Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop, then to Minimalism, and on to Neo-Expressionism, until art’s isms exhausted themselves, Freilicher devoted herself to painting “eternally fixed afternoons,” to borrow a phrase from Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem “Chez Jane.” (In addition to being a phenomenal artist, Freilicher was a muse of the New York School.) In the attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard—and with a similar passion for color—Freilicher, who died in 2014, at the age of ninety, found beauty at home, whether in her Greenwich Village apartment or at her house on the East End of Long Island. The best of these luminous views unify inside and outside—and still-life and landscape. The fifteen works in the exhibition “Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World,” at the Kasmin gallery, lean into the artist’s interior side.

That nails it: “attentive tradition of Pierre Bonnard”; “passion for color”; “found beauty at home.” Let’s give a huzzah for Freilicher’s distinctive, delectable art.

Jane Freilicher, Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape) (c.1990)

May 21, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s New Yorker:

1. Jane Freilicher’s “The Painting Table” is one of this blog’s touchstones (see here). This week’s “Goings On About Town: Art” contains a wonderful description of two of her other paintings: 

“Early New York Evening,” made in 1954, frames a vista of reddish-brown apartment buildings between a vase of irises in the foreground and four distant smokestacks in a violet sky. In an interior painted the same year, the threshold between a living room and a bedroom becomes an adventure of yellow highlights and lavender shadows. 

2. Richard Brody’s capsule review of Howard Hawks’s Fig Leaves (1926) is excellent, featuring this inspired observation: “Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken.”

3. Adam Gopnik is a natural-born first-person writer. His best pieces are all first-person, e.g., “Cool Runnings” (The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2016), “Bread and Women” (The New Yorker, November 4, 2013), and “New York Local” (The New Yorker, September 3 & 10, 2007). His “Bottled Dreams,” in this week’s issue, has a great subject –a vintner’s quest to create a truly American wine. But, for me, the piece is spoiled by its detached third-person perspective. Where is Gopnik’s inimitable “I” –  the “I,” in “Cool Runnings,” who attends a football match (“Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavík, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match”); the “I,” in “Bread and Women,” who bakes bread with his mother (“I was taken by the plasticity of every sort of dough, its way of being pliable to your touch and then springy—first merging into your hands and then stretching and resisting, oddly alive, as though it had a mind of its own, the collective intelligence of all those little bugs”), the “I” in “New York Local,” who visits a community garden in the Bronx called The Garden of Happiness (“I had come to the Garden of Happiness not only to see a New York City chicken committee in operation but also to get myself a chicken”)? In these pieces, Gopnik is personally present. In “Bottled Dreams,” his voice is there on the page, but that’s all. When Grahm gets in his Citroën and drives out to look at the Popelouchum property, is Gopnik with him? It’s unclear. Is Gopnik present for the wine-tasting session in Bonny Doon’s back office? Again, it’s unclear. Is Gopnik with Grahm when he returns, for the first time in a quarter century, to his original vineyard in Bonny Doon? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s implicit in the details Gopnik uses to describe these scenes that he was personally present. Nevertheless, I miss the verification of his authenticating “I.” 

4. Anthony Lane, in his review of a new movie version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, says that the film’s director, Michael Mayer, and its screenwriter, Stephen Karam, “have pruned, or purged, the drama until it runs just over an hour and a half, and, in so doing, mislaid its nervous languor.” This criticism is mild compared to Pauline Kael’s evisceration of Sidney Lumet’s 1968 The Seagull: see “Filmed Theatre” (The New Yorker, January 11, 1969; included in Kael’s classic 1970 collection Going Steady). Kael called Lumet’s version a “disaster” (“The movie version of Chekhov’s The Seagull is a disaster, not because it is a filmed play but because it is a badly filmed play”). She says, “Technically, the movie is slovenly.” But apparently even a slovenly production of The Seagull is worth watching. Kael puts it this way: “The Seagull is a terrible movie, but it is a movie of The Seagull.”

Postscript: John Ashbery 1927 - 2017

John Ashbery, in his poem “The Skaters,” asks, “How much survives? How much of any one of us survives?” In Ashbery’s case, there’s no question his poetry will survive. Dan Chiasson calls him the “greatest American poet of the last fifty years” (“Postscript: John Ashbery,” newyorker.com, September 4, 2017). But Ashbery was also an inspired art critic. His Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957 – 1987 deserves to survive, too. Here, for example, from his essay “Jane Freilicher,” is his description of her great The Painting Table:

“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.

That comment on the “crudely scumbled” coffee can, “whose rim is an arbitrarily squeezed ellipse,” is brilliant! Reported Sightings brims with such observations. Ashbery was not only the “greatest American poet of the last fifty years”; he was a terrific art critic, too.

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.

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.”