Painter Among Poets

On meeting Ashbery, Freilicher took her new friend along to the first day of shooting of a film by Rudy Burckhardt, and they both ended up starring in Mounting Tension (1950), along with Larry Rivers and Ann Aikman. The production is a comic, improvisatory enterprise, instinctively tongue-in-cheek in its representation of romance and modern art. Halfway through, we first see Freilicher sitting at her desk with her feet up on the table, reading a detective story, with a portrait of Freud and a stuffed alligator hanging on the wall behind her. This is Madame Frauhauf, a psychoanalyst and solver of problems, who advertises by way of sandwich boards worn by unhappy-looking men. Hearing Rivers’s footsteps on the stairs, Freilicher hides her book, strikes a pose, and sashays across the room to greet him. She is smart and restless, a moll in gainful employment, charmingly assured; first, she adjusts Rivers and his sexual frustrations by a talking cure, then by sheer quackery, and finally by seducing him. Ashbery plays the part of the jock-boyfriend, resentful of Aikman’s sudden enthusiasm for modern art. The two arrive in Madame Frauhauf’s office for couple’s counseling—only to find Rivers there who is, by chance, part of their problem; he had previously tried to bed Aikman in his painting studio, showing her various female nudes and waggling his eyebrows in such a way as to suggest a certain logical inevitability. Ashbery and Rivers chase each other around Madame Frauhauf’s office trading blows, the four actors visibly stifling grins. Burckhardt then cuts abruptly to the final scene, in Central Park, where the couples have swapped for no good reason and harmony has been restored: Aikman rows on the lake while Rivers plays his saxophone, and Ashbery paints Freilicher on the bank. It’s a Parnassian vision undercut by the senselessness of events: the characters have literally wandered into each other’s lives off of the streets of Manhattan, and that which is casual and ephemeral has been committed to celluloid. Freilicher turns her face to the sun, smiles, and arches her back, and we see for ourselves the truth of O’Hara’s description of her in his poem “To Jane” as a “slightly thoughtful, smiling Jane.” We see the same look in photos of her at the time, and in her portraits of women—a cheerful look of inward preoccupation. She alone knows what she is doing, and isn’t sure what all the fuss is about.

That same summer, Rivers was also staying out at Southampton, and he wrote a paean to Freilicher—an eight-page eclogue in which Ashbery, Koch, and Rivers take turns to praise Freilicher, who “fears beauty like a nun,” whose “silent power is rooted in reason,” who is “blessed with a brain”—a “queen who holds her court.” The last line in the poem is Freilicher’s voice, calling out to them: “John, Kenneth, Larry, / I have the coffee set.” There are many unpublished poems like Rivers’s in Freilicher’s papers, which are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. O’Hara, for instance, wrote a poem-portrait that was literally shaped to resemble her face. Koch, Ashbery, and Porter each wrote poems that were either about her or dedicated to her. “Jane thinks poems should end,” Koch writes, “not with a bang but a whimper; / The quiet demise of a thought she’d defend / As the meter gets limper and limper.” The massed intensity of these poems—no matter how much they verge on doggerel (or perhaps because they do so)—is the most persuasive indication of Freilicher’s effect on others. She inspired the gift of attention—uncritical, adoring attention. Freilicher would be the first person to admit herself nonplussed by the cause of this to-do. Unlike other painters, she did not directly collaborate with her poet friends, sitting down to make lithographic prints like Rivers and O’Hara did together for Stones (1960), or taking a poet’s words and including them in a painting, as Hartigan did with O’Hara’s “Twelve Pastorals” in her series Oranges (1952). Though Freilicher designed the sets for plays, book covers, and contributed images to books of poetry, her images all have an accommodatory feel, as if she were making room for the poet, helping to stage their words rather than creating any kind of third mind. For instance, her sketch of marigolds on the cover of Hearing (1966–76) (music by Ned Rorem and poems by Koch) is calm and light. The landscape drawings she did for Charles North’s poetry collection Elizabethan & Nova Scotian Music (1974) are similarly modest, casually beautiful. The house she drew for What’s For Dinner? (1978), Schuyler’s third novel, seems simply designed to express the comforts of a well-appointed home. In this collaborative work, she is setting the tone, but not the subject.

O’Hara and Freilicher’s friendship is a particularly good instance of the ways in which passionate regard led to art. Among others, O’Hara wrote the poems “Interior (With Jane),” “A Sonnet for Jane Freilicher,” “Chez Jane,” “Jane Awake,” “Jane Bathing,” “Jane at Twelve,” and “To Jane, Some Air.” Many of these were characterized by pleasurably baroque visions of possible lives and transformations—in “A Terrestrial Cuckoo,” O’Hara imagined the two of them in a canoe “paddling up and down the Essequibo.” The poem ends:

          . . . To return with absolute treasure!

          our only penchant, that. And a red-
          billed toucan, pointing t’aurora highlands
          and caravanserais of junk, cries out
          “New York is everywhere like Paris!
          go back when you’re rich, behung with lice!”

Look at a distant star directly and it disappears; look at it from the corner of your eye and it reappears, a faint prick of light. The same summer that Rivers wrote his eclogue about Freilicher, and Freilicher tolerated shallow water and muddy ankles for art, Schuyler and Ashbery, in the back seat of a car driving back from Southampton to New York City, began to pass a notebook back and forth, writing alternate sentences of a story that would become their collaborative novel A Nest of Ninnies. The novel’s first sentence—ironically enough, given their location—is spoken by twenty-something Alice Marshall, who stares into her own eyes in the mirror above a mantelpiece as she says, “I dislike being fifty miles from a great city. I don’t know how many cars pass every day and it makes me wonder.” Driving past houses exactly like Alice’s, Schuyler and Ashbery were calling on their shared history with “the outer suburbs.” As Schuyler later wrote to Clark Coolidge: “Certain things about his mother and her house, and my mother and her house are strangely (?) alike—as a glance in their respective china cupboards would plainly show.” It was these china cupboards—and the question of what they represented when it came to issues of aesthetics and art—that delighted Ashbery and Schuyler in chapter after chapter during the sixteen years it took to finish the novel. A Nest of Ninnies satirizes any modernist notion of creative exile by carefully documenting the minutiae of middle-class travel aspirations of characters who meet over cocktails and at dinner parties, first in the commuter suburb of Kelton, then in New York, Florida, and finally in France and Italy. The characters’ conversations rarely turn to contemporary events, politicians, writers, or artists. Rather, the main vehicle for satire in A Nest is taste—and the novel’s humor comes from “tasteful” habits, such as the peppering of one’s speech with French phrases. Cultivation is measured by how one decorates one’s home with the spoils of one’s sorties in Europe. Alice and her beau, Victor, even decide to open a “notions shop,” which is intended to be a cut above the rest. Their conversations about what to include are pricelessly precious:

          “Well,” Victor said, “you see, we’re trying not to specialize—like French copper-bottomed pots,
          for instance. On the other hand, we are trying to play down Japan a little.”

          “And what’s more,” Alice boomed with unexpected gusto, “we feel it’s time the Western
          Hemisphere had its day in court. Besides Guatemalan rebozos, we’re getting some Eskimo
          walrus-tooth accessories and some Navajo turquoise and silver jewelry that’s not the usual junk.”

The comic intensity of Schuyler and Ashbery’s collaboration came from the splitting of cultural hairs. Even if you were making fun of it, matters of taste were of slight but crucial distinction. The humor of A Nest was so particular that in their letters to each other, Ashbery and Schuyler regularly conjugated the novel’s title: one could do “a little Ninnying”; one could be “very Nest.” Chapters, as they were completed, were distributed among friends. Fifteen years later, when she had finished reading the full book, Freilicher wrote to Schuyler and remarked, “I feel I have sat for quite a few life studies in it, especially Fabia Bridgewater. But I guess that’s what accounts for its profound universality. Gosh you boys are clever! A gold mine of silliness, that’s what it is.” (Fabia, a young woman with no small amount of moxie, is fond of speaking what’s on everybody else’s mind, especially if they don’t wish to remark on the matter out loud.) 

This sense of singularity only increased throughout the 1950s. By Grey Day (1963), Freilicher was increasingly allowing her colors to separate rather than blend; the pink apricot streak on the far shore in this painting has no echo. Looking at this painting, one senses, quite clearly, that the world is being resolved as a painting, along with her willingness for us to see the terms of this translation. The syntax of her painting—the formal elements of line, wash, the thickness of her strokes—was becoming clear. Each painterly gesture is presented so distinctly in Woman in a Photograph (1963) that we sense an instructive force. And in her nudes there was a growing pleasure in the intensity of color—a tendency that was matched by Porter’s own appetite for color in his paintings of domestic interiors. In Nude on a Green Blanket, the green blanket she’s resting on is a pleasure to look at because it is so strong a visual element. The color has its own shape, its own upward motion that balances the model’s own weight pressing down. In the pool of pink skin, the brown nipple has as much presence as the lips; each line hovers as democratically as contour lines on a map. The eyebrows and eyes are as succinct as the rooftops in Grey Day. The musculature is as faint and distinct as a thought.

On the one hand, these changes are most likely an indication that Freilicher, moving from her late twenties into her thirties, was coming into her own as a painter. But there were other more specific events that aided this sense of consolidation. In 1952, Freilicher met Joe Hazan, whom she had first seen in Burckhardt’s film The Dogwood Maiden (1949). (Hazan, in turn, had first seen her in Mounting Tension.) They married five years later, and moved first into an apartment at 16 West 11th Street, then later into a penthouse apartment nearby on Fifth Avenue. Hazan was working in the family sportswear business and they regularly spent summers out at Southampton, in 1960 building a house in Water Mill, overlooking Mecox Bay. “If one were to describe my early twenties,” Freilicher recalled in interview, “it might be called after Thomas Mann’s story ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow.’ I’ve grown into a certain amount of maturity.” There is the distinct sense from letters, interviews, and her own work that Freilicher settled into an increasingly domestic routine, dividing her time between Long Island and Manhattan, and, in 1965, giving birth to her daughter, Elizabeth.

These events—marriage, a series of new homes and a child—are usually considered distractions to women artists, hindrances to their careers. But for Freilicher, they became the wellspring of her invention. As Ashbery wrote of Freilicher in 1984, “After the early period of absorbing influences from the art and other things going on around one comes a period of consolidation where one locks the door in order to sort out what one has and to make of it what one can.” It is a “question,” he wrote, “of conserving and using what one has acquired,” of “having to live with the pleasures and perils of independence.” The rhythms of her daily life allowed for a new depth, a quickening of her skill, because she focused, over and over again, on capturing the interiors of her apartment in Manhattan and home in Long Island, along with the view of the city or countryside beyond. The views are not spectacularly dramatic or glamorous; the water towers in her New York skyline are quietly identifiable and the fields and estuary seen from her windows in Southampton are prosaic, an undistinguished rural setting occasionally interrupted by houses in the distance. But the extremity in her art came from her commitment to these views. In 1975, she was commissioned by the Department of the Interior to paint “the American scene” and was offered a trip anywhere in the United States to do so—but Freilicher chose to paint another view from her home. “I have to feel comfortable where I am,” she noted in an interview. “I have to burrow in and feel at home.”

Schuyler’s anticipation is daily, modest. The house, he notes, is “alive with paintings.” Their shared taste is emphasized. Yesterday, he writes, “she / and John bought / crude blue Persian plates”—plates that could have quite easily turned up in one of Freilicher’s paintings.

Schuyler was also fascinated with flowers and color, in tracing the narrowing of visual focus. Consider the ending of his poem “February,” in which we move from inside a tulip to the day beyond, sensing the shapes of objects in the world around us, the way they take up space—and in turn, the way we take up space. There is also an exact focus on the relationship between parts in a coherently unified scene:

          It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
          It’s the shape of a tulip.
          It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
          It’s a day like any other.

Schuyler and Freilicher were not particularly close friends; indeed, their aesthetic similarities may have more to do with Porter and Schuyler’s friendship—and Porter’s domestic interiors—than anything else. And any commonality could be put down to broader and deeper currents in the art and poetry world. For instance, despite Schuyler and Freilicher’s care with the visual coherency of flowers, neither had any interest in being held to any standard of empiricism. Freilicher did not sketch her scene onto her canvas before painting, and she commented in an interview that a painting’s composition only resolved itself as she painted: “I might plunk down a number of vases, or some flowers, or some stuff, in a window, and add the window. I sketch around it, not really knowing what’s going to happen. At a certain point, I have an idea, and then I have to resolve it. Sometimes the resolution is bumpy. It’s sort of like moving furniture in a room where you think you have it and then you find it’s all wrong.” This sense of arrangement and rearrangement, of moving in close then standing back—the slow resolution of an “idea,” a thought, or a mood—is a nice description of the creative process involved in any composition, musical, visual, textual, or otherwise. The focus was on capturing how one saw the world, with all the attendant phenomenological twitches and adjustments that this process implied. O’Hara noticed this then when he wrote that her “responsibility seems to be her perceptions rather than to painting,” as did Schuyler, writing in one review of her work that “the emotional force of an object is allowed its compositional weight . . . Structure is an improvisation, composed as painted, not a skeleton to be fleshed out.” In his poems, Schuyler was just as attentive to correcting his perception, in tracing the movement between the unplanned, the observed, and the invented. This attentive improvisation is not so unusual among painters and poets, but the similarity between Schuyler and Freilicher (and Porter) became more pronounced given their shared subject matter. Looking at Freilicher’s Southampton paintings in the 1980s, we can easily recall Porter’s assessment of Schuyler’s poetry as offering “a deceptively simple Chinese visibility, like transparent windows on a complex view.”

Like a shout across a body of water, we cannot trace these echoes back to their source, and nor would we really want to. Maybe it is enough to suggest that the three shared a taste, a gentle desire for very similar kinds of art, as well as for a gracious existence composed of the pleasures of the good life: beautiful things, fine food, excellent company. It’s this sense of commitment to pleasure that seems so consonant with Ashbery and Schuyler’s quiet amusement in A Nest of Ninnies. Freilicher traveled three times to Europe in the 1960s, and on each occasion visited Ashbery, then living in Paris. In 1962, they traveled through Sicily, Barcelona, and France, and in 1964, they drove through France and Spain to Morocco with Ashbery, Joe Hazan, and Larry and Clarice Rivers. These two trips—the rambling, ambitious Grand Tour—are precisely the kind of trip made by the characters in A Nest of Ninnies. The novel is a ghostly echo of real lives, and in that sense, constructs a kind of shared ground against which we can place their friendships. We could well ask what this parallel implies, especially if the novel contains a deliberately flattened sense of psychological interiority; what, for instance, separates Paul Lambert—a character who enters exuberantly into the novel, as “a dark heavyset man of thirty-eight, with busy but receding hair” and who roars “Well, Victor . . . at last we meet!”—from Harry Mathews, the writer on whom Lambert’s appearance, manner, and hobbies were based? A Nest of Ninnies’s refusal to engage in conventional interior “depth” suggests an anxiety, or at least a question to which there is no easy answer—and this question, it seems, is about that decorative sensibility which is accepted by all characters as sufficient grounds for contentment. In a way, the characters’ uncritical pursuit of the ornamental, their time spent touring historic sites, sitting in restaurants, and discussing surprisingly inevitable romantic matches, is a kind of aesthetic blood-letting, a warding off of inconsequentiality by fully engaging in it. It takes some nerve to engage so faithfully with this kind of beauty, especially when the art world around you is set on dismantling the relevance of a bourgeois sensibility in art. The middle-class familial routines of Freilicher’s life were at odds with the cold-water flats and daily poverty that characterized the downtown painting world in the 1930s and 1940s, its attendant machismo that Freilicher thought “was not terribly interesting” but which many painters of her own generation were prone to idealize. Some, with a degree of concern and condescension, pitied her. Hartigan, for instance, noted in her diary on more than one occasion that Freilicher’s paintings seemed “timid & fearful.” Similarly, critical concern was not so much with Freilicher’s difficulty, but with her appeal; commenting on The New York Times’s decision not to review one of her exhibitions in 1971, Schuyler wrote to Mathews, “Poor Jane . . . I don’t understand it—her work seems to be so filled with appeal; but I guess that’s what Kramer and Canady don’t like in art.”