黑料不打烊

In 2005, the poet John Ashbery presented his friend, painter Jane Freilicher, with the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Painting. In his speech he praised the way that she tackled subjects that were extremely familiar like “still lifes, or landscapes, sometimes viewed through a window,” but in a “way of painting [that] is constantly different, fresh, and surprising.” Ashbery was alluding to the fact that Freilicher came of age as a painter in a time and place where abstract painting, not still lifes or landscapes, reigned supreme. In New York in the 1950s and 1960s, the vanguard of painters were splattering, smearing, and pouring the paint on their canvases and eschewing connections to the real world. Freilicher, by contrast, unapologetically represented reality (Ashbery affectionately called it a “slightly rumpled realism”). Her works, Artforum writer Jan Avgikos notes, “are visually anchored to her own lived experience, her own desires. We see who the artist was in the myriad objects she collected, cherished, and chose to depict… [and in the] places from which she gazed at the world for more than fifty years.”

Jane Freilicher, Cat on Velvet, 1976.

Those “places” often featured a window, as Ashbery noted in his speech. Freilicher painted window scenes in both of her studios – an apartment in Greenwich Village and a home in Water Mill, Long Island – dozens of times over many decades, making it one of the most ubiquitous motifs in her oeuvre. In these works, she pays close attention to both the interior and the exterior, depicting the window not as a barrier but more as a threshold between these two spaces. Though these could be considered documentary gestures, as they are records of moments and places in time, the window paintings do much more than that: they engage with the nature and history of painting itself, explore the beauty of both the urban and the natural environs, and capture the artist’s inner world.

The Nature and History of Painting

Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti famously wrote in 1435 that the canvas was “an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.” This metaphor and its concomitant methodology endured for centuries, privileging single-point, humanist perspective in the artist’s rendering of the world. Starting in earnest with the Dutch genre painters of the 17th century, some artists began to depict the window itself – the frame, the panes, the drapery, the sill – and the objects or people within the room and the structures outside the glass.

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

Freilicher clearly delights in this window-within-the-window-on-the-world. While many of her window paintings announce themselves just by their title or by the obvious way in which a vase of flowers sits on a surface in front of a tableau (Window on the West Village, 1999; Harmonic Convergence, 2008; At Night, 2011; Window, 2011), others explicitly include the architectural elements, such as Peonies on a Table, 1954; Cat on Velvet, 1976; Studio Interior, 1982; Bread and Bricks, 1984; and Untitled (Still Life with Large Plant and Cityscape), 1990. The window frame emphasizes both the inside and the outside, situating us on the threshold. Though the window is a “mundane” piece of architecture, scholar Duncan P.R. Patterson writes, it actively “participates in our daily becoming, in our confrontation and negotiation with the world.”

Freilicher pays homage to her painterly predecessors in the still lifes that are included in nearly every single window work. In a 1986 interview, she explained that she liked to “play still life or architectural elements of the studio against the landscape, maybe as a way of asserting control – maybe also to indicate another subjective level, the simultaneous experience of an interior and outside world, closure and openness." Vases and jugs of vibrant flowers, sprightly potted plants, glass bottles, small statuettes, food, and painters’ tools are present either singly or in some combination in the interior space, their intimate nature contrasted with the more anonymized, distant exterior buildings. Like the great Baroque still life painters, the items are rendered with care and precision and intimate ephemerality – we know the blooms will fade, the leaves will fall, the sun will set, the moment will pass, the painter will die, and we will die. But Freilicher’s still lifes are far from didactic or melancholy; instead, they are warm, winsome, and contentedly meditative.

The Pastoral and the Urban

Jane Freilicher, View from the Window, 1970.

Freilicher spent a great deal of time on Long Island’s eastern shore where she and her husband owned a home. Many of her paintings of this verdant, idyllic landscape were mediated through the pictorial device of the window, allowing her to explicitly contrast the interior and exterior as well as explore the similarities and differences between pastoral and urban views.

Jane Freilicher, Window on the West Village, 1999.

In View from the Window, 1970, and Still Life Before a Window, 2007, for example, it isn’t the Hudson River out her window but Mecox Bay on Long Island. The flowers aren’t blooms purchased from a corner market but instead probably picked from somewhere on her property. Goldenrod and Landscape, 1967 and Corner of Studio, 1973, feature lambent green fields and rustic houses in the distance, not densely packed buildings, cloistered rooftops, and smokestacks. The landscape paintings are elegant and evocative, and Freilicher clearly finds respite and peace in this place far away from the city.

Jane Freilicher, At Night, 2011.

But the beauty of the pastoral window scenes does not mean that the window paintings of New York City are bleak or oppressive. Rather, they are equally charming, the daytime scenes rendered in delicate pastel hues and the crepuscular scenes in dreamy, deep blues. In Window on the West Village, 1999, for example, Freilicher looks out past a few potted plants to her neighborhood and the river, with the building blocks of warm terracotta, salmon, butter yellow, and lilac, and wispy white clouds in a baby-blue sky. In Window, 2011, the brilliantly hued flowers are complemented by buildings in similar colors, and Cat on Velvet, 1976, is a cozy domestic scene with a cat resting on a red velvet blanket in front of large windows that look out to the city. Freilicher’s window paintings of New York aren’t cloying or sanitized, and they do often depict smokestacks or crowded streets. But they capture the magic, the allure, the dreaminess of the city in the way Toni Morrison writes of it in Jazz: “I have seen the city do an unbelievable sky…there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean itself, go deep, starless.”

Jane Freilicher, Twelfth Street and Beyond, 1976.

Like his fellow poet John Ashbery, James Schuyler associated Freilicher with the window. In Looking Forward to See Jane Real Soon, Schuyler depicts his friend arranging flowers on her West Village studio sill that looks out over the city: “Jane, among fresh lilacs in her room, watched / December, in brown with furs, turn on lights / until the city trembled like a tree / in which the wind moves. And it was all for her.” When we look at Freilicher’s window paintings, we see more than just the room and the view – we see Freilicher herself.

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