Image: Lincoln Glenn, New York
Lincoln Glenn is spotlighting Jane Freilicher’s 'Town on a Plain (Orange Western Landscape)', a work from the artist’s formative period in the 1950s and early 1960s. The gallery presents the painting as a representative example of Freilicher’s mature style, developed during years when she was defining her approach within a New York art scene still dominated by Abstract Expressionism.
The work is an oil on canvas measuring 24 1/4 by 32 1/4 inches. It is signed lower left and signed and titled on the canvas overlap. Lincoln Glenn identifies it as a post-war work by Freilicher, who lived from 1924 to 2014 and grew up in Brooklyn. According to the gallery’s material, she studied at Brooklyn College and Columbia University before continuing with artist and teacher Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Freilicher’s career developed in conversation with, rather than in submission to, the period’s dominant tendencies. Lincoln Glenn notes that in the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism held sway, she gravitated toward the work of Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse. She joined the American Abstract Artists with her friend Nell Blaine and held her first solo exhibition in 1952 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. The gallery’s description frames 'Town on a Plain (Orange Western Landscape)' as emerging from that pivotal period, when Freilicher was shaping a distinctive visual language.
That language was rooted in realism, but not in straightforward description. Lincoln Glenn says Freilicher developed a luminous, expressive mode that brought together still life, cityscape and landscape in richly colored, atmospheric paintings. In the gallery’s catalogue text adapted from an essay by curator Clanci Jo Conover, the artist is described as valuing vitality over strict fidelity to her subject, and as working toward “the quick, lively blur of reality as it is apprehended rather than analyzed.” The same source links the painting to Freilicher’s interest in balancing “opulent beauty in a homespun environment.”
The gallery also places Freilicher within a broader social and artistic network that shaped midcentury New York. Lincoln Glenn describes her as being at the heart of a lively circle of artists, poets and friends, including painters Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, as well as poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. The source materials characterize her as a frequent muse to poets while also suggesting that her own work was shaped by the creative process and intellectual exchange of those around her.
The presentation is part of Lincoln Glenn’s wider effort to revive the legacies of artists working between the 1950s and 1970s whose contributions may have been overlooked. The New York gallery, founded in 2022, says it focuses on American art from the 19th century through the late 20th century, with a particular emphasis on Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, while also revisiting artists whose names have faded from art historical memory.
Lincoln Glenn is based in New York with galleries in Chelsea and on the Upper East Side. The gallery’s website lists 'Making Space: American Women Artists and the Century of Change' from July 2 to August 22, 2026 at its Chelsea location, and '250 Years: American Women Artists and the Nation’s Story' from October 1 to December 4, 2026. 'Town on a Plain (Orange Western Landscape)' is presented on the gallery’s artworks page as an example of Freilicher’s work from the 1950s to early 1960s.
