Suzy Frelinghuysen at Salander-O'Reilly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

During her lifetime (she died in 1988) Suzy Frelinghuysen showed for the greatest part in group exhibitions like those organized by the agency of the American Abstract Artists; this selection of paintings and papiers colle from various periods of her career was, astonishingly enough, the first solo exhibit accorded to her work. upon display were the fruits of a lifelong devotion to cubism, here understood as a manner of picture-making that she adapted to her have changing uses.

Her earliest work, from the late 1930 and early '40 commits in form and content not single to "modernity" but to "modern art" (one collage called, after a bit of print from a catalogue, Still Lives by the agency of Picasso wittily features a cameralike shape with an illusionistically painted half-sphere where its len should be). In these oil and collage compositions, Parisian cafe motifs, of that kind as glasses, bottles and newspapers, mingle with equally traditional musical concerns that in Frelinghuysen's case relate to her parallel career as an opera singer. She matches cubist form-layering with a delicate touch, physical and optical, typically employing azures roses or yellows together with black and brown These pictorial investigations reach a sort of climax in Aqueduct (1948) in which interlocking cerulean triangles combine with rose-purple and brown-black bend s to evoke a figure. This personage is given social location via fragments of a racetrack hand-bill and is set in a shimmering yellow-green-blue color space.

Frelinghuysen's large "mural" compositions of the 1950 upon masonite or cement, evince an interest in expanding the decorative potential of her earlier small abstractions. Here the image keeps to shift away from the center of the composition, where classic Cubism would have placed it, and suggestions of diagonal change across or even out of the picture plane arise. The 77 1/4-by-67-inch Composition (1950) is set uped of large irregular geometric forms that the pair interlock and give the impression of unrestrained movement. The smaller Composition from a Glass (1953 in oil and collage upon masonite) contains figurative elements, on the other hand they hardly matter: what began with reflection upon the world has become composition, a construction put together from pieces, each spatially independent of the others on the contrary related to them by color, value and the formal means of cubist drawing.

A large abstract painting, undated on the other hand clearly a late work, tantalizingly give an inkling ofs the direction taken by Frelinghuysen in other work at the same time to be exhibited. The cubist armature is make opened up, with areas of mainly light, close-valued colors, in built-up layers showing the marks of the brush, in the way that that the canvas is filled on the other hand with room left everywhere for breath. Like this pleasing exhibition as a whole, this work combines thoughtfulnes discipline, a spirit of exploration and sheer delight of painting.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group