CHEZ JANE.(Brief Article)

The poet John Ashbery once remarked, "From the moment that life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions." He might have been talking about the art of Jane Freilicher, who has been a good friend of his for half a century. Sensual ardor damped down by ironic resignation is something that Freilicher's paintings share with Ashbery's poetry. Both induce an urbane and intelligent pleasure, of a sort that I associate with T. S. Eliot's often quoted comment about Henry James: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." Ashbery, of course, is a much acclaimed literary figure, famous for the soaring abstraction and pitch-perfect vernacular of poems whose meaning is anyone's guess. Freilicher, whose landscapes and cityscapes haven't been in fashion for even a moment of her long career, has a narrower expressive range, and she works in a medium in which there is no obligation to make paraphrasable sense. Still, she is a wonderful, absurdly underrated painter.

Two shows at the National Academy of Design make the best possible case for Freilicher's subtle gifts--and, incidentally, for the academy itself, a sleepy and genteel but delectable institution that was founded, in 1825, to "promote the fine arts in America." Artists who have been entitled to append "N.A." to their names range from Thomas Cole to Robert Rauschenberg, but most have been less well known and, before a recent liberalizing trend, distinctly conservative. The academy's quarters, in a mansion near the Guggenheim Museum, retain a musty air of risk-averse old money. In this context, Freilicher's lively eye and sly wit shine. One of the current shows is a mini-retrospective of her cityscapes, which she paints looking out of her eighteenth-floor penthouse on lower Fifth Avenue. The other is the latest exhibition in a series called "The Artist's Eye," of works chosen from the academy's large permanent collection by member artists. Freilicher's selection includes a few big names, such as Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent, but it favors the unexpected and the offbeat. The show is an object lesson in the quickening effects of enthusiastic discernment. It teases slow delights from paintings that might otherwise command only a passing glance.

Freilicher was born Jane Niederhoffer in Brooklyn in 1924. Her mother was an amateur pianist who, as a teen-ager, played in silent-movie theatres. Her father was an Eastern European immigrant who worked in the Brooklyn courts as a translator of Spanish and Yiddish. In 1942, Jane married Jack Freilicher, a jazz pianist whose band, after the war, employed a young saxophonist named Larry Rivers. Rivers--whose death, on August 14th, extinguished one of contemporary art's most vivid personalities--became her lover and, inspired by her example, an artist. She studied with Hans Hofmann, and became fast friends and a sometime collaborator with the quartet of poets known as the New York School: Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. In 1952, she had her first solo show, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. That year, she took up with Joseph Hazan, a dancer, painter, and businessman. She married Hazan in 1957 and began dividing her time between the city and a house in Water Mill, on Long Island, whose big-windowed studio and surrounding meadows and dunes continue to be constant subjects of her paintings.

Freilicher's literary circle gave her a close but detached angle on the excitements of Abstract Expressionism. So did the heterodox example of Fairfield Porter, the brilliant painter and critic who, while revering Willem de Kooning, argued that modern art had gone wrong in following Paul Cezanne instead of Edouard Vuillard. Porter's color-based, brushy realism, in pictures of tranquil nature and of bohemian-bourgeois, summer-house domesticity, continues to look better and better. (He died in 1975.) His sternly principled but ...