Alicia Longwell Remembers Jane Freilicher

Artist Jane Freilicher first came to the East End of Long Island in 1952, which was also the year of her first solo show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan. Painter and critic Fairfield Porter wrote a perceptive and admiring review for ARTnews that rings true to this day, calling the work “traditional and radical.” Her paintings, he wrote, “are broad and bright, considered without being fussy, thoughtful but never pedantic.”

That summer, Ms. Freilicher rented a cottage with poet Kenneth Koch—her neighbor on Third Avenue—his friend, poet John Ashbery, and artist Larry Rivers, whom she’d met several years before when he was playing saxophone in a jazz band. Long, solitary hours in the studio would be mitigated by a circle of talented intimates, a circle that would soon expand to include the poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler.

Ms. Freilicher and her husband, Joe Hazan, whom she married in 1957, began spending summers in Water Mill that year and built a house there in 1960. The second story of an adjacent building, built the following year, became her studio, and from this post she looked out on the surrounding Water Mill landscape.

It was this perspective that would occupy her artistic vision for the next 50 years during her annual stay on the East End. In the city, her studio was a former greenhouse atop a downtown building. Almost without exception, she painted landscapes and cityscapes, often with still-lifes in the foreground.

It was my great good fortune to know Jane. We met shortly after I came to the East End and began to work at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. Her somewhat reticent manner was mitigated by her dazzling wit, which needed only a few well-chosen words to sum up any situation. She did not suffer fools gladly and could communicate more effectively with silence than many can convey with a thousand words.

For many years, she gave a party in Water Mill for poet John Ashbery’s July birthday. I learned early on that the endless recollection of her “salad days” amid the glittering circle of young poets and painters was not for her. Nostalgia was not part of the equation. I was always surprised that the conversation was never about what happened 50 years ago, but what was being worked on the day before.

In a 1966 interview with Mr. Schuyler, Ms. Freilicher spoke about her work. “I’m interested in landscape, but there’s a paradox: It’s depressing to get that realistic look. ‘Why, that’s just the way it looks!’ Or, ‘I know that time of day.’ ... Of course a landscape goes on forever, but a picture doesn’t. So very soon it has a composition or a form of its own.”

And it is this authenticity that Ms. Freilicher always sought. References to things in nature are not outweighed by the reality of what happens on the canvas, where mere bits of pigment form into dazzling depictions that have a life of their own.

Over the years, Ms. Freilicher has shown us this astonishing transformation time and time again, and her paintings will continue to inform and captivate all who see them.

Alicia G. Longwell is The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.