Jane Wilson 2020 Brochure (2)

D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y Jane Wilson and one of her abstractions, Bleecker Street, New York City, 1950’s

JANE WILSON was a presence in the New York art world from her arrival in New York in 1949 until her death in 2015. Born in 1924 on her family’s farm in Seymour, Iowa, Wilson broke the tedium of farm life by drawing the rural world around her. At her mother’s urging, Wilson attended the University of Iowa to study painting in a progressive art department where she was exposed to the early beginnings of Abstract Expressionist work coming from New York.

Upon arriving in New York City, she and her husband, John Gruen, settled in Greenwich Village and immersed themselves in the downtown art scene. A founding member of the legendary Hansa Gallery in the 1950s, Wilson 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 late 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. In the mid-1950s, the Stable Annuals were major events that featured the work of both well-known and emerging artists, from Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to Robert Rauschenberg and Helen Frankenthaler. At that time, Wilson was producing abstract expressionist work that resonated with the energy of the moment. Among the many artists whom she met at that time, Fairfield Porter, older and more established, became especially important to her, as his commitment to modernist representational painting Jane Wilson in her studio at 2095 Broadway, New York City, January 8, 1999

supported her growing interest in portraiture, still life, and landscape painting.

Lifting Storm: Water Mill, 1985. Oil on canvas, 60 x 80 inches (cover, detail)

Night Fall, Montauk, 1990–91. Oil on linen, 30 x 37 1⁄4 inches

Cloudless Blue, 1990. Oil on canvas, 36 x 50 inches

Wilson’s career as an artist began to take off in the early 1960s. The Museum of Modern Art acquired a large landscape, The Open Scene, in 1960, and Andy Warhol commissioned her to paint his portrait, Andy and Lilacs, which he subsequently donated to the Whitney Museum of American Art. That year she also joined Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which represented several of her friends and other, mainly young painters, including Frankenthaler, Porter, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, and Nell Blaine. In the 1960s, Wilson painted portraits of herself, family, and friends that express her deep connection to the sitter and sophisticated understanding of the qualities of paint.

By then, Wilson, Gruen, and their daughter, Julia Gruen, were 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,

Julia’s Third Birthday Party, Water Mill , New York , 1961

and coastline. After years of summering and renting,

BACK ROW, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT : Lisa de Kooning (blond child), film director Frank Perry and his wife, script

she and her husband purchased an old shingled carriage

writer Eleanor Perry, John Myers, Anne Porter, Fairfield Porter, Angelo Torricini, Arthur Gold, Jane Wilson,

house in 1960. From the late 1960s through the late

poet Kenward Elmslie, painter Paul Brach, Jerry Porter ( behind Brach), Katharine Porter, friend of Jerry

1970s, Wilson focused on still lifes set in her apartment

Porter; SECOND ROW, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT : Joe Hazan, Clarice Rivers, Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, Miriam

and studio in New York City. Wilson crafted carefully constructed still life scenes, inspired by historic paintings

by Renaissance, Northern Renaissance, and Baroque artists, to create what she called “landscapes on tables.”

Schapiro ( Brach), pianist Robert Fizdale, Jane Freilicher, Joan Ward, John Kacere, Sylvia Maizell, Nancy Ward ( behind Maizell) Kneeling, FROM BACK TO FRONT : Alvin Novak, Willem de Kooning, Jim Tommaney; FRONT ROW, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT : Stephen Rivers, William Berkson, Frank O’Hara, Herbert Machiz All photographs © Estate of John Gruen

Wilson’s still lifes from this period are abstracted and dynamic, with brushy strokes and painterly energy.

Heat in August, 1991. Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 inches

“When, in the late ‘50s, we started to spend summers

“The painting I do is the only way I have to catch

in Water Mill, nature again came to the fore, and I was

something that is constantly changing. To capture

once more surrounded by land and sky. Back then the

experience. Light has a physical presence, but at the

place was almost totally agricultural, and the potato

same time it’s fused into this magnetic experience of

fields swept right up to the dunes. This was all deeply

sky which is totally elusive. So there’s a metaphorical

familiar to me, and I felt that, if I painted it, I would

element to this practice — the constant challenge of

understand it.”

1

– JANE WILSON, 2007

trying to capture something that can’t be captured.

I love how the sky is constantly changing, how it’s so complicated. Changing color, changing humidity,

In the early 1980s, Wilson made a decisive move to more

changing light, changing winds, changing temperature.

personal and expressive landscape painting, for which

It’s really too much to deal with! And yet, at the same

she is best known today. Wilson’s luminous paintings

time, I find the experience vital and elating. And I do

hover between abstraction and representation, and were

think that there’s something universal in the experience

inspired by sky, sea, and land. She focused on events of

of the sky, a feeling that truly envelops you.” 2

the natural world – seasons of the year, times of day, and

– JANE WILSON, 2001

the many moods of the weather. Evoking these constant occurrences, Wilson directed her energies towards mak-

In 1999, Jane Wilson joined DC Moore Gallery, where

ing the most ephemeral phenomena visible, capturing

she has had eight solo exhibitions. Wilson’s paintings

the effects of shimmering light, heavy air, and passing

are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art,

thunderstorms. Working downward from the top of

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum,

the canvas, Wilson added layer upon layer of pigment,

and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;

a technique that provided extraordinary translucence

Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and

and resonance. Stripped of extraneous detail, the paint-

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC;

ings present, low, thin, mostly horizontal planes of land

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia;

and ocean below a sky that can just as easily be taken as

Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; Art Institute

an abstract field of pattern and color, anchored to a low

of Chicago, IL; and San Francisco Museum of Modern

horizon that is a juncture of light and substance.

Art, CA, as well as other museums across the country.

1. Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow. Interview with Jane Wilson. Jane Wilson,

2. Spring, Justin. Interview with Jane Wilson. Jane Wilson Land | Sea | Sky,

Exh. Cat. New York, NY: DC Moore Gallery, 2007, unpaginated.

Exh. Cat. New York, NY: DC Moore Gallery and Heckscher Museum of Art, 2001, unpaginated.

Eclipse, 1991. Oil on canvas, 74 x 80 1⁄4 inches

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