I learned of Jane Freilicher through taped interviews she did with art critic Peter Schjeldahl as he conducted research for a book on Frank O’Hara. Schjelddahl wanted to know about O’Hara’s former lovers and sought out the preeminent “urban pastoral” painter known to conspire with Ashbery, Koch and Schuyler. “That’s what people want to know, right – did he or didn’t he? It’s quite a job for you – in the muck,” she laughs. “I was thinking of my little flat on West Tenth Street, which was really abominable, and the sort of camaraderie of those days. It seemed very much like something out of Puccini. I was wondering if that’s what young artists have now. It seems very remote. I felt like I was Mimi or something.” Though O’Hara’s history was what I was after, I soon found myself drawn to the voice of a woman who seemed equal parts electrifying and refined. Ashberry offers confirmation, “Jane is probably my favorite person in the world.. everything she says is screamingly funny, although she doesn’t seem to intend it that way and I am always getting her in hot water by laughing at her gags in the presence of people who don’t seem to have noticed any humor going on.” At 17 she eloped from Brooklyn and married a jazz musician stationed at West Point, an experience that would prove to be psychically and physically isolating. Around this time she began painting seriously. She commuted to Hunter College for six months for what was then called ‘design’ classes. “They didn't really have a department called art. And it was actually a new department and was sort of pioneering in the sense of it trying to be kind of like a new Bauhaus thing,” she recounts to Smithsonian historian Barbara Shikler. It wasn’t until a friend suggested she study spatial and color theory with painter Hans Hofmann, who had moved his art school from Munich to Manhattan, that her work in meditative, Cezanne-like, still lifes crescendoed. She moved back to the city, footing the fall out of a new divorce, cocktail waitressing and training her eye for the essentials: buoyant strokes, ochre and lavender vases, bouquets that would never break against the uneven floorplans of life, skylines more sea green than city smog. She could not have known she would share a kitchen with Koch, or meet his childhood friend Ashbery, subletting from Koch one summer. “A poet’s painter,” they called her. O’Hara writes numerous odes to Freilicher, poems called “Chez Jane,” “Interior (with Jane),” and “Jane Awake.” “She half incloses worlds in her eyes / she moves as the wind is said to blow / she watches motions of the skies / As if she were everywhere to go,” he writes. O’Hara believed one should make art for and about one’s friends. Freilicher believed home, and the privilege of artmaking within the comforts of home, was immensely important. This is a fortuitous match when the poets wander back and forth, apartment to apartment, listless, and the painter is content walking no further than her sill, knowing and seeing that out and up is fully within one's latitude.
-Katie Calderon