Customer Reviews

Jane Freilicher: March 1995

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4 star:		(1)
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Books published by Harry N Abrams Inc are to art books what the Joy of Cooking is to cookbooks; standard-setters for excellence of text, reproductions, and layout. This one informed me both by connecting Freilich to her cohort (the gereration around her) of painters and poets and by giving me excellent commentary on the works reproduced in the book.

I cannot make sense of talk about a painting if I cannot see the painting, or a reproduction of that painting. Kertess does this. He also evinces the ability to draw out from almost-incidental details a great deal more than met my rather inexperienced and ignorant eye. I "know what I like" and like her work, but Kertess elarged my sphere of why her work attracts me, why I enjoy it so much, and how I am connected to the vast stream of art in history by being influenced not only by her work, but by those of her art cohort, those making waves in the Fifties and onwards. Anyone attrracted to the cover of this book will LOVE its interior!

Few contemporary artists whose work has spanned the past half century have the committed following personally and artistically as Jane Freilicher. Through the explosions of America's art movement - Abstract Expressionism - and through the various other trends in art that have enhanced our art scene, Freilicher's lovely canvases have always stood as oases of tranquility and grounding. This magnificently produced monograph could not be more fitting for such a fine artist.

What makes Freilicher's art so meaningful? Surely not the choice of subject matter which has always been the New York Skylines, Long Island porches, gardens and vistas, and table tops with explosions of flowers plucked from the garden. No, it is not the subject but instead the honesty of simple approach to the subject, capturing nature and life as a state of intimacy and worthy of realistic representation. The more than 150 images make their own ebullient and colorful statements, defying reduction to words.

Not that the accompanying words don't enhance Freilicher's art! The texts are by poet and longtime friend John Ashbery and the fine art historian Klaus Kertess. The essays inform the art almost as much as the art informs the quality of writing. In every way this is a first class monograph of a growingly important artist of our time. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, December 05

If you don't know Jane Freilicher's paintings, here's a way to get a gorgeous dose of them quickly. The introduction by John Ashbery is insightful and makes it clear why Ms. Freilicher is an important contemporary artist. This is more than a coffee table book; it's a treasure.