Jane Freilicher’s paintings evoke a downtown milieu that has since come to represent the period’s golden age of spirited, improvisational artistic freedom

Jane Freilicher (1924-2014) established herself in the 1950s among a generation of New York painters including Helen Frankenthaler, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers. ‘50s New York is the first book to focus on Freilicher’s paintings of that decade–a body of work that Fairfield Porter perceptively termed %traditional and radical.% It includes early still lifes, portraits and the studio views that elucidate her characteristically deft balance of interior and exterior. Painted within various studios in lower Manhattan, the works are evocative of a downtown milieu that has since come to represent the period’s golden age of spirited, improvisational artistic freedom.

The book includes an essay by writer Nathan Kernan; a 1958 conversation between Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery; rare archival material from across the artist’s life; and a full chronology.