Women’s Work

Provenance:

Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, New York

Private Collection, New York, New York

Lot Essay:

Jane Freilicher grew up in Brooklyn, completing her education at Brooklyn College and Columbia University before going on to study with the artist and teacher Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Steeped in the New York City art scene of the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism dominated, Freilicher gravitated more to the work of Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse. She joined the American Abstract Artists with her friend Nell Blaine and had her first solo exhibition in 1952 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. 

Town on a Plain (Orange Western Landscape) comes from this 1950s to early 1960s moment when Freilicher was defining her career and mature style. The artist developed her own luminous, expressive mode based in realism, incorporating still life, cityscape and landscape into her rich, colorful, atmospheric paintings. She once told ARTnews: “I’m quite willing to sacrifice fidelity to the subject to the vitality of the image, a sensation of the quick, lively blur of reality as it is apprehended rather than analyzed. I like to work on that borderline - opulent beauty in a homespun environment.”

Freilicher was at the heart of a lively circle of artists, poets and friends, including painters Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, and poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Often the poets’ muse, Freilicher was in turn shaped by the creative process and intellectual discourse of her closest friends.