Jane Freilicher was a central figure in the post-World War II art community of New York City, a social circle of insurgent artists centered in Lower Manhattan and on the eastern tip of Long Island. Painter Grace Hartigan described the dynamic: “There's a time when what you're creating and the environment you're creating it in come together.” She was talking specifically about a certain group of poets and painters living in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. Known famously now as the “New York School,” the group included poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler; Abstract Expressionist painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell; and “second-generation” New York School painters Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Michael Goldberg, and Larry Rivers, who were influenced by Abstract Expressionism but also reacted against it by creating works that were hybrids of “pure” abstraction and traditional representative painting (https://poets.org/text/artists-poets-new-york-school).
Historically, attention on this group has focused on its tabloid fodder outsized male personalities—Pollock, de Kooning, and Rivers among others—whose biographies offer an alluring mix of art, mixed with transgressive behaviors involving alcohol, drugs, and sex. In 2018, both reflecting and spurring a renewed interest in overlooked women artists, Mary Gabriel wrote Ninth Street Women (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2018) highlighting the important careers of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. Jane Freilicher is a recurring presence in Gabriel’s narrative, a much-loved figure in the world whose true contours Gabriel has worked to restore. Freilicher was especially notable as the initial and ongoing link between the artists who were her colleagues and the poets who were her friends. Frank O’Hara wrote poems to her. “She was the goddess for all the young New York poets, who fell for her warmth, her wit, and the fact that she was so modestly understated and yet so brilliant in every conceivable way” (Gabriel, p. 435).
Jane Niederhoffer was a 17-year-old Brooklyn College student in 1941 when she eloped with jazz pianist Jack Freilicher. In 1945, Jane, back at Brooklyn College as an art major, traveled with Jack’s band to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, drawing and sketching to occupy her time. Days were free for musicians and she convinced the band’s saxophonist, Larry Rivers, to try his hand at art. The Freilicher marriage was annulled sometime between 1946 and 1949. Jane graduated from Brooklyn College in 1947, and in 1949 got a master’s degree in art education from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, where she took a course with Meyer Shapiro.
Freilicher’s early years living in Manhattan and trying to make art offer a familiar struggling artist’s story: a succession of jobs that took too much of her time and energy—waitress, secretary, art teacher—and a succession of addresses. Dates remain hazy but some details emerge. Around 1950, Freilicher was living in a communal building at Third Avenue and 17th Street owned by a friend of a friend and sharing a kitchen with a young poet, Kenneth Koch. When Koch returned home to Ohio for a brief visit, he left it to Freilicher to welcome his house guest and college buddy, John Ashbery. Frank O’Hara and Jimmy Schuyler soon joined the circle. As Mary Gabriel relates, it was initially through Jane Freilicher that the poets of the New York School were introduced to the painters of the New York School, joining the convivial meeting place at the Cedar Tavern (p. 429).
The pace of Freilicher’s personal and professional life quickened in the early 1950s. By 1952, she had met Joe Hazan, a former ballet dancer and sometime painter, who, together with his brothers, managed his parents’ garment factory. Freilicher married Hazan in 1957, a union that endured until Hazan died in 2012. This meant that throughout her mature career, Freilicher enjoyed financial security and a stable family life, giving birth to a daughter in 1967. Around 1952 a series of fortuitous connections launched the careers of Freilicher, Rivers and Fairfield Porter (1907–1975). Freilicher recalled that:
around that time—Larry, meanwhile, was having great success as he was being discovered by Clement Greenberg. And he got connected with Johnny Myers and Tibor de Nagy Gallery. And he brought John Myers, I think it was, not Tibor, to see my work. And they offered me a show, which sort of was beyond what I'd ever really dreamed of. As far as I can remember, I really didn't have—that wasn't a priority, becoming an exhibiting artist.
Porter was a generation older but had not yet broken through as a painter. He was working as a freelance reviewer for ArtNews when he went to visit Freilicher’s studio as she prepared for her exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Porter reviewed Freilicher favorably, which led to Freilicher and Rivers visiting Porter at his studio and seeing his work. Porter was also a friend of Elaine and Bill de Kooning. Some combination of de Koonings, Freilicher ,and Rivers convinced John Myers, the managing director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery to give Porter his first show. Porter’s family split their time between Maine and Southampton, Long Island, and the near proximity of the Porters to Freilicher on Long Island cemented a lifelong friendship that proved important to both artists.
