Jane Freilicher, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, is an American painter best known for her Southampton landscapes, Manhattan skylines and still lifes. Freilicher studied with Hans Hofmann and Meyer Shaprio, yet established her own painting-style, a marriage of abstraction and representational painting, in which Freilicher exquisitely creates a balance between depiction and suggestion. Freilicher’s work encourages a sustained observation to note her expert, yet subtle shifts and changes from atmosphere to color to light to brushstroke
As a member of the informal New York School, Jane Freilicher surrounded herself with artists such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Nell Blaine, Larry Rivers, and poets John Ashbury, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. In a 2005 piece called “Leave It to Jane” for Poetry, John Ashbury described Freilicher’s work, “Her pictures always have an air of just coming into being, of tentativeness that is the lifeblood of art.” In particular, Jefferson Market by Jane Freilicher depicts Jefferson Market Library from a roof top view, nestled in the quaint tableau of Greenwich Village where Freilicher lived and kept her studio. Jefferson Market grants the viewer Freilicher’s eyesight, to see the skyline through her eyes. One notices the glimmer of green ivy that crawls to the top of the buildings, highlighting resilient nature within the city, under a calm, pastel clouded sky.