Jane Wilson Reflected Still Life Single Page

Jane Wilson Reflected Still Life

Essay by Lilly Wei

D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y

A BOUQUET OF ROSES IN SUNLIGHT

Say that it is a crude effect, black reds, Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are To be anything else in the sunlight of the room, Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor, Too actual, things that in being real Make any imaginings of them lesser things...

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way We feel and, therefore, is not real, except In our sense of it…

– WALLACE STEVENS (1947)

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Summer Tea Time , 1978. Oil on linen , 30 x 25 inches

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Double Still Life: Afternoon, 1978. Oil on linen , 50 x 40 inches

Winter Tea Time , 1978–79. Oil on linen , 30 x 25 inches

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Notes Toward a Supreme Painting * The just under two dozen still lifes in this exhibition by Jane Wilson (1924–2015), particularly the ones made between 1977–1979, might surprise those of her admirers with visions of dazzling, color-drenched landscapes in mind, generally considered her signature achievement. In a prodigious oeuvre of mostly landscapes and still lifes (she was also an accomplished portraitist) steadily, prolifically executed across six decades, this series is a rarity, and rarely shown.

Nonetheless, they are ultimately familial and like all her work, meticulously made and exactingly considered. Each is a painting in its own right, but it is also part of a characteristically rigorous investigative process driven by constant questions about the nature of painting, about paint and what it can do. She once said, in a conversation about her still lifes, that they depended more on empirical observation than her landscapes which, in the end, were inflected through memory and imagination. The majority of the still lifes here were created in 1978 and many, perhaps the entire series, were first shown at Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1978, a gallery that represented her for nearly two decades.

The present exhibition also includes a few examples from earlier in the decade to demonstrate the trajectory of this series and how radical it was.

Wilson studied at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, earning a BA and MA in 1945 and 1947 respectively. One of her professors was James Lechay, an American abstract painter who championed the French Impressionists. He introduced her not only to the techniques and storied history of European painting, but also to contemporary art borrowed from prominent New York collections and institutions, exhibitions that were made possible by the eminence of its faculty. Because of that, she had advanced, firsthand knowledge of the exhilarating, innovative paintings that would make New York the next global cultural capital, as the School of Paris gave way to American upstarts. Classically trained (her daughter Julia Gruen said she could draw anything), with an art history background, Wilson found Western European art and its humanistic values deeply sympathetic. * Title in reference to Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction by Wallace Stevens (1942)

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Theban Fish , 1978. Oil on linen , 40 x 30 inches

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Consequently, her early work was representational, her still lifes and landscapes displaying a great appreciation for, among others, Chardin, Bonnard, FantinLatour, and Manet, the latter’s flower paintings some of the most exquisite ever made. Wilson made several paintings in tribute to her former professor, including one here, Lechay’s Studio, from 1974 in which she inserted a painting within a painting, accompanied by a number of plain, sometimes curious objects that she increasingly favored as subjects in her still lifes, no doubt encouraged by him.

Nonetheless, like countless artists at the time, she was intrigued by Abstract Expressionism, recognizing its historical significance. Her infatuation was fanned by her move to New York in 1949 with her husband, the critic, author, and photographer John Gruen. They soon became part of a coterie that would be known as the New York School, many of its now legendary artists the couple’s lifelong

Lechay’s Studio, 1974

friends. Always a bit of a rebel— quietly, disarmingly, but determinedly so— she

Oil on linen , 30 x 21 inches

soon realized that she preferred having a subject as a starting point and returned to painting representational works, focusing on landscapes for much of the 1950s and 1960s, and still lifes in the 1970s, as she experimented, incrementally evolving a highly personal style balancing image and abstraction.

Wilson began this series of still life paintings in 1977, though she started to focus on still lifes several years earlier. She was teaching at Columbia University, Parsons, and briefly at Cooper Union in the 1970s and 1980s although she had taught, off and on, from the time she completed graduate school. It was teaching, she said, that led her to still life, claiming it to be the most profound and the most difficult of genres. Gruen, when asked about these still lifes, said that they were most likely the result of teaching, what Wilson was thinking about then, what problems she was trying to resolve, what she wanted to present to her students.

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One of the earliest of the series is Spanish Ribbon (1977), still relatively conventional but with glimmers of more idiosyncratic ambitions. The gaze alights on a beguiling off-center red bow, then circles toward a roll or pastry of some kind and an orange oblong that in other paintings is clearly a brick. The background is either a wall or an opening, its enigmatic, central shape flanked by two lighter sections, the spatial readings ambiguous, fluid. The line-up of objects occupies the middle ground. This assemblage of objects would be the cast of characters that she would scrutinize for the next two years, to which a teapot and occasionally Spanish Ribbon , 1977.

fruit would be added, the placements more improvised, although always with a

Oil on linen , 21 x 20 inches

certain innate elegance, even when she espoused more randomness in composition, like throwing down some fish into the mix, and painting them as they lay.

Gruen, in another anecdote, remembers her mother taking a roll she liked the look of from the breakfast basket of their hotel in Italy, and bringing it back to New York to add to her cast. Perhaps it was an amused nod to Cézanne’s apples, but it also underscored a growing inclination for less likely subjects, for what was available and caught her eye.

In Black Pepper Still Life: Noon (1977–78), the set-up is given one more essential component: compressed cardboard holders for packing wine bottles, placed horizontally here, freestanding, but afterwards, always positioned vertically as the (back)ground. Like musical études, she painted her chosen objects repeatedly, intently, with variations, studying them from a multitude of angles under varying conditions until she was satisfied. Part of her practice has always been the methodological exploration of process, of learning by doing. Still lifes, she once said, forced her to simplify, which in turn showed her the “specific energy” of each object and its strongest, clearest contour.

The activation of the composition, of the entire surface, was one of the issues that absorbed her, from the small works to the larger scaled. As the series progressed,

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the arrangements were more tightly interlocked, positive and negative space made equivalent, the cardboard wine bottle dividers assuming a primary role, perceptual teasers that toggle between the positive and negative, binding the imagery together, as she juggled formal imperatives with those of subject matter. They bring to mind Giorgio Morandi and his elimination of the intervals between his objects, a simple, but seismic event.

Wilson has always been adroit in handling closely valued colors, close harmonies.

The paintings are now nearly monochromatic, increasingly muted, the objects pushed forward, the space flattened, all part of a visual equity of surface that she sought, the brushwork of the ground as beautifully worked as the strokes that created the objects. The loss of a wider spectrum of readily visible colors was more than compensated for by the tonal richness that the layering of colors produced, a layering that she concentrated on in these still lifes and would become indispensable, bestowing upon the paintings a sumptuous luminosity. From the mid-1970s onward, she never painted directly onto the raw linen that she used as her support, a common practice among her peers. Instead, she primed it like the Old Masters did, and she never painted wet-on-wet, since the result could too easily become mud. Instead, she waited until the preceding layer of paint had dried before applying a new layer. The colors bloomed, reflected, and refracted through the multiple layers. Inspired by Delacroix, she also didn’t mix pigments together to compound her colors; instead, she added white. Making test sheets of tints that were precisely annotated, including the brand, she could reproduce the desired hue with fidelity.

The objects in the series progress from the obdurate to the deliquescent, the title of one of them, Limestone Still Life (1978), particularly apt in describing the former mode. Some of the geometric objects look as if they had been quarried, and none have identifiable textures except for that of the paint itself. Wilson said that in still life, she wanted “the paint to re-capture the tactile sensation. The object becomes sculptural, making shapes in and around each other, and that is very moving to me.”

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Roman Still Life, 1978. Oil on linen, 66 x 55 inches

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Double Still Life: Midsummer , 1978. Oil on linen , 60 x 50 inches

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Some moderately sized paintings, Summer Tea Time (1978), Winter Tea Time (1978–79), Tea in Summer (1979), and Tea in August (1979) have titles like journal entries: event, season, month, and in other instances, the time of day, clues to the changing conditions of the light under which they were created. The contours vary, outlined with lighter or darker colors, the halo broader or narrower, and so radiant that at times the vessels appear sanctified, the reality of the external light colliding, colluding with the painted light. The change in the appearance of the table should be noted as it is raised and lowered, bared or draped with a cloth, its folds sharply incised or about to dissolve.

Summer Tea Time is the earliest dated from this group. More three-dimensional, even cubistic, it is modeled with a more emphatic chiaroscuro, a harshness that is countered by a roseate glow. The cardboard depressions are more apparent here (but again, they can appear to be rounded wine bottles when you look again, upright or neck downward, like a visual game of hide-and-seek).

Winter Tea Time, one of the highlights for me, is softer, the outlines less distinct, the colors even more closely modulated, the edges of the tablecloth pixelating into brush marks. The radiance it projects is argent, but again not cool. The critic Paul Garner describes it as having the “warmth of tarnished silver.” Tea in Summer is dominated by a flourish of turquoise, the color, perhaps of a triumphant dawn or dusk, the objects gilded, as if dipped in golden light, the mysterious whitened polygon that appears throughout this series a top note. Tea in August, on the other hand, is more of a reverie, its blue greyed, but still warm, suffused by ochres and corals, its most distinctive feature the vanishing act of the table, the cloth receding into the pale claret of the bottom of the painting, the objects becoming less solid, floating. They, too, seem about to become air, predecessors to those miracles of pure spun color and poignant moods that are her landscapes and skyscapes from the late 1980s onward.

Another subset presents the same objects doubled, as if reflections of each other, the format the largest present, the size also approximately doubled. They resemble bas-reliefs, specifically those of dynastic Egypt, with their hieratic arrangements and divisions, including a circumscribing cartouche-like frame, or a penumbra.

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Double Still Life: Dawn, 1978. Oil on linen , 50 x 40 inches

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The Egyptian reference is brought up in other titles, Theban Fish (1978) and Egyptian Apple (1978), again reminding us of her art historical background and the wide net of her interests. The imagery in Double Still Life: Dawn (1978) and Double Still Life: Afternoon (1978), is faint, like a mirage, and almost indecipherable at first. The objects have become schematic, pictographic, heraldic.

Showing one array of objects right side up, the other upside down, she might reverse the composition like a mirror image or roughly duplicate it, long before it became a widespread strategy. These multiple views make the point that what we see is never completely seen, never wholly captured, that changing points of view change what we see and know, and “not real,” except in her “sense of it.”

Wilson had often cited Wallace Stevens, considered by many to be the greatest American poet of the twentieth century, as an outsized influence, as he was for several generations of poets and painters. His ventures are a kind of linguistic still life, in which the imagined, and the felt is matched with uncanny, brilliant precision to what is seen, to objective reality. Among Stevens’ magnum opuses is Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), in which he discusses and defines the nature of poetry this way: it must be abstract, it must change, it must give pleasure. He might also be talking about Wilson’s painting.

“Painting a still life, for me, is memorializing a fugitive world, a world that has

a solid life of its own,” Wilson noted. Hers are a slow, revelatory read, essays on perception, images wrapped in a sense of quietude. They may be more about perceptual exegesis (in which a napkin is the same as a mountain), than traditional meditations on the theme of vanitas, yet, in some respects, at some level, like almost all art, they, too, are a hedge against non-existence, mortality.

– L I L LY WE I

Lilly Wei is a New York based independent curator, critic, art writer, and journalist whose area of interest is contemporary art around the world.

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Golden Pears , 1978. Oil on linen , 21 x 20 inches

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Blue Pears, 1978. Oil on linen , 21 x 20 inches

Stone Still Life , 1978. Oil on linen , 21 x 20 inches

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Black Paper Still Life: Noon, 1977–78. Oil on linen , 20 x 21 inches

Limestone Still Life , 1978. Oil on linen , 20 x 21 inches

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Tea in August, 1979. Oil on linen , 30 x 25 inches

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JANE WILSON

Jane Wilson was a presence in the New York art world from her arrival in 1949 until her death in 2015. Born in 1924 on her family’s farm in Seymour, Iowa, Wilson attended the University of Iowa to study painting.

It was there that she was exposed to the early beginnings of Abstract Expressionist work coming from New York.

Upon arriving in New York City, Wilson settled in Greenwich Village and immersed herself in the downtown art scene. A founding member of the legendary Hansa Gallery in the 1950s, she had three solo shows at Hansa in 1953, 1955, and 1957. She also participated in important group shows during these years , such as one in 1952 at Tanager Gallery, another of the most active artists’ cooperatives, and in three annual exhibitions from 1953 to 1955 at the Stable Gallery on West 58th Street. At that time , Wilson was producing Abstract Expressionist work that resonated with the energy of the moment.

By the 1960s, Wilson was living on East 10th Street, across from Tompkins Square Park, which led her to create atmospheric cityscapes of the park and surrounding neighborhood. She also worked in Water Mill , New York, on the East End of Long Island, painting the fields, houses, farms, and coastline.

However, starting in the late 1960s and through the 1970s , Wilson moved her focus away from the landscapes and cityscapes and chose to instead paint still lifes set in her city apartment and studio. This transition to still life painting was initiated primarily by her teaching painting instead of art history, where she focused her students on the study of still lifes.

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Jane Wilson, Riverside Park,

It was during this time of still life painting that Wilson developed what

New York, NY, 1970’s

would become her signature painting technique. Instead of the common

Photo © Estate of John Gruen

technique of direct painting, which involves applying wet paint to wet paint, Wilson discovered that a richness and complexity of color application could best be attained through indirect painting , with a wet layer of paint placed upon a dry one. This approach allowed each layer of color to stand on its own instead of being muted by the layer on top of it. While the subject matter of Wilson’s paintings later changed, she never wavered from this technical approach towards her medium.

In the early 1980s, Wilson made a decisive move to a more personal and expressive landscape painting, which she continued to explore for the remainder of her career. Wilson’s late paintings hover between abstraction and representation, and are inspired by sky, sea, and land.

Jane Wilson’s paintings are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, as well as other museums across the country.

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D C M O O R E G A L L E RY 535 West 22 Street New York New York 10011

dcmooregallery.com 212.247.2111

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jane Wilson: Reflected Still Life DC Moore Gallery, February 17 – March 26, 2022

© DC Moore Gallery, 2022

Notes Toward a Supreme Painting © Lilly Wei , 2022 Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight from The Auroras of Autumn © Wallace Stevens, 1950

isbn: 978 -0-9993167-5-7

Catalogue Managers: Edward DeLuca and Sabeena Khosla Design: Joseph Guglietti Printing: Brilliant Photography: © Steven Bates

cover: Summer Tea Time (detail), 1978. Oil on linen , 30 x 25 inches pages 2/3: Theban Fish (detail), 1978. Oil on linen , 40 x 30 inches opposite & front interior flap: Jane Wilson: Reflected Still Life ,

Fischbach Gallery, New York, NY, May, 1978

D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y