Jane Freilicher (1924–2014)

JANE FREILICHER (1924–2014)
Hill and Sky, 1963
Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 in.
Signed and inscribed (at lower right): Jane Freilicher; (on stretcher): “Hill and Sky” Jane Freilicher; (in script, on back of canvas): “Hill and Sky”

EX COLL.: the artist; to [Tibor de Nagy Gallery, around 1972]; to the artist; by gift to private collection, New York, until the present

Hill and Sky is a product of Freilicher’s approach to let the brush and the canvas guide her art. Though she had begun her career as a figurative artist painting landscapes and still life, in the late 1950s she began a series of abstract paintings that reflected her early training with Hans Hoffmann and the circle of abstract artists who were her friends Freilicher describes her chief inspirations as a trio of older French impressionists—Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Jean-Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). As with many of her figurative landscape paintings, Hill and Sky offers a bisected canvas with land and sky. In this instance, the elements that compose the land are expressed in an abstract pattern of color and texture. This contrasts, to take one example, to a work of the same year, Wide Landscape (1963; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), also likely a Long Island landscape. These two canvases, chronologic but not stylistic siblings, illustrate Freilicher’s free choice to paint as the spirit moved her. Freilicher’s palette in Hill and Sky shares a similar Long Island aesthetic with much of the work of her friend, Fairfield Porter, both reflecting the experience of the greens, blues and yellows of a hazy day at the eastern tip of Long Island.