Jane Freilicher, a Painter and Great Wit, Dead at 90

One of the second wave of 20th-century artists who found their way to the South Fork and used the landscape as a chief source of inspiration, Jane Freilicher died on Dec. 9 at home in New York City of complications of pneumonia. She was 90.

She was versed in abstraction very early as an artist, demonstrating what she learned at Brooklyn College to Larry Rivers when they became friends in 1945. Through the recommendation of Nell Blaine, another artist, they both went on to study with Hans Hofmann. Yet she, like Rivers, ultimately found her natural artistic argot in figurative painting.

Her usual subject matter was a landscape or cityscape viewed from an interior that took in objects on the windowsill or table along the way. The objects were often flowers, stemming from a childhood fascination with the bouquets her father would purchase at the subway. “I pulled them apart, fixating on the petals,” she told The Star in 2008. The windowsill objects evolved over time and included her reproductions of subjects from old master paintings.

"Mallows," 1997

The landscape that most inspired her was her four-acre property in Water Mill that abutted what was once the 235-acre Henry Ford estate. With the subdivision and development of that surrounding land over the years spoiling her studio’s once-vast view out to Mecox Bay, she tried unsuccessfully to convince the Southampton Zoning Board of Appeals to allow her to raise and enlarge it so she could see past the houses. Instead, she said, her more recent paintings of that vista relied mostly on memory. She also painted in a studio in her Greenwich Village home, often with the same flowers grown from her garden on the windowsill overlooking the cityscape.

Freilicher was the last name of her first husband, Jack, whom she married when she was 17, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The marriage was dissolved a few years later. She met Joe Hazan in 1952 and married him in 1957. He died in 2012, and they have a daughter, Elizabeth Hazan, a son-in-law, and three grandchildren who survive them.

"Early New York Evening," 1954

Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on Nov. 29, 1924, to Martin and Birdie Kominsky Niederhoffer, she grew up in Brighton Beach and was valedictorian at Abraham Lincoln High School. In addition to art, she studied French literature and poetry in college. She then moved to West Point, where Mr. Freilicher was stationed and where he played in the West Point Army Band. Following the war, he joined the same band as Rivers and they played together that summer in Maine.

After attending Hofmann’s school, she studied with Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in 1948. During this time, she met the group of New York School poets who would become lifelong friends. These included Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara, who was the first to buy one of her paintings. She told The Star in 1997 they were a wonderful support group and she liked that there was “a directness, a lack of pretension” about them.

Jane Frelicher back in the day                                                                             John Jonas Gruen

While she earnestly tried abstraction, she was quite taken with a 1948 retrospective of Pierre Bonnard at the Museum of Modern Art as well as other retrospectives of Vuillard, Courbet, and Matisse. These artists became her influences, leading her away from Abstract Expressionism. “It’s true that I didn’t conform to the mainstream zeitgeist,” she said in 1997, “but it wasn’t so much a matter of choice — it’s just something that you do.”

"Still Life, Persian Carpet," 1955

Her first solo gallery show was in 1952 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which was under the direction of John Myers. She eventually followed him to his own gallery. After some years of other representation, mostly at the Fischbach Gallery, she rejoined Tibor de Nagy in 1998 and exhibited there regularly until the present. Over the years, museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art have shown and collected her work.

This week, Eric Brown, director of Tibor de Nagy, said she was “one of the most important 20th-century painters to record the Long Island landscape.” While during much of her six-decade career landscape painting was “considered retrograde and out of fashion . . . in recent years Jane’s work has found a wider following among young artists, who unlike previous generations exist in a pluralistic contemporary art world.”

"Light from Above," 1982

Also in 1952, she met Fairfield Porter, who would become a great friend, mentor, and champion of her work. Even though she and her husband had visited East Hampton in summers prior, it was through visiting Porter, who lived in Southampton, that they decided to build the house and studio in Water Mill in 1960, she said in 1997.

These were the years of the summer beach and backyard parties captured in books such as “Hamptons Bohemia” and photos by John Jonas Gruen, who, with his wife, Jane Wilson, was counted among Ms. Freilicher’s friends for almost a half-century. A longtime art critic, he said this week that “Jane was a painter of very particular talent, and we loved the clarity and beauty of her landscapes and still lifes.”

While Ms. Freilicher said in 1997 that she valued the lack of “glitter and Hollywood infiltration” of the early days, there is one photograph Mr. Gruen took of Kim Novak, one of the famous actresses of that era, visiting her studio and looking very glamorous. In 1950, Ms. Freilicher did some acting herself, playing the role of the psychiatrist in Rudy Burckhardt’s film “Mounting Tension,” with Larry Rivers and John Ashbery.

"A Jar of Forsythia," 1990

Her friends loved her, as Mr. Gruen put it, for “her wit and drop-dead responses to people’s foibles and on-target beau mots about life in general.” She inspired endless devotion among her poet friends, who often chose her as a subject, prompting her gallery to devote a show to it in 2013, “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” featuring poems such as O’Hara’s “A Sonnet for Jane Freilicher,” “Chez Jane,” and “Jane Awake,” to give just a few examples.

Although her paintings frequently had a brooding psychological mood, it was not something she liked to discuss. “When I paint a subject and then look back at the painting, how it goes together is often a mystery,” she said in 2008. “I don’t have a plan. People try to extract some meaning, but it is what it is.”

The Ross School in East Hampton is establishing a Jane Freilicher Scholarship to help students benefit from a Ross School education, regardless of economic circumstances. More information is available at 907-5214.

“Interior (With Jane)”

The eagerness of objects to

be what we are afraid to do

cannot help but move us    Is

this willingness to be a motive

in us what we reject?    The

really stupid things, I mean

a can of coffee, a 35¢ ear

ring, a handful of hair, what

do these things do to us?    We

come into the room, the windows

are empty, the sun is weak

and slippery on the ice    And a

sob comes, simply because it is

coldest of the things we know

— Frank O’Hara, 1951, from “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets”