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Lady with the Sunshade, 1910
oil on canvas,
32" x 32"
On loan from the City of Owosso, On display at the Shiawassee Arts Center
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The Garden Pool, c.1913
Recently sold for $2,368,000,
setting a new world auction record
for a Frieseke painting
Click for More Information
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Frederick Carl Frieseke
1874-1939
Born in Owosso, Michigan, Frederick Frieseke studied at The Art Institute of Chicago
beginning in 1893, before going East to the Art Students League in New York City in
1897, and then to Paris in 1898. There, he studied at the Acadamie
Julian, and with James Abbott McNeill Whistler for a short period at the Acadamie
Carmen.
Frieseke's earliest mature works, images of individual women in interiors painted in
fairly close tonalities, reflect Whistler's influence, but once he and his wife settled,
in 1906, in the art colony at Giverny, where Claude Monet resided, Frieseke rapidly
developed a very original aesthetic which would have an impact upon almost all the later
figural painters among the colonists.
The Friesekes rented a house, surrounded by tall walls, which had been the residence of
Theodore Robinson, one of the founders of the Giverny art colony. There they developed a
sumptuous, colorful garden which served as the setting for many of Frieseke's pictures.
The outside of their house was painted in strikingly bright colors, yellow with green
shutters, while the living room walls were lemon yellow and the kitchen, a deep blue. The
artist also maintained a second studio on the Epte River, which ran through the town,
where he painted many of his renderings of the nude outdoors.
In Giverny, Frieseke concentrated upon monumental images of women, usually single
figures, posed in domestic interiors or sun-filled outdoor settings, often in the floral
garden his wife tended so conscientiously. But the rendition of sunlight, not flowers, was
Frieseke's primary concern. As he himself acknowledged in 1912, "It is
sunshine, flowers in sunshine, girls in sunshine, the nude in sunshine, which I have been
principally interested in for eight years. . . ."
Unlike the earlier artists in Giverny, such as Robinson, Frieseke's Impressionism was
an unreal construct, his sunlight and color entirely synthetic; one modern writer has
noted that "His light hardly seems to be plein air light at all. In fact it
seems entirely artificial ... a stunning concoction of blues and magentas frosted with
early summer green and flecks of white."
These qualities are abundantly apparent in In the Doorway (now, Good
Morning), probably painted around 1912 or the following year, with its
counterpoint of pinks, greens, and yellows, depicting his model entering the Friesekes'
Giverny home from the garden. Frieseke's art has often been identified as "Decorative
Impressionism." Despite the immediacy of the pose, and the moment of introduction
defined by the picture's present title, the emphasis on pattern and decoration in the
model's striped dress, contrasted with the sparkling color pattern of the garden's blooms,
and the concomitant flattening, two-dimensional effects, ally the work more with the
painting of the Post-impressionists than with the perceptual aesthetics of orthodox
Impressionism.
Though the Friesekes remained in Giverny for fourteen years, until 1920, neither
they nor any of their fellow artists who arrived in the early twentieth century became
close to Monet. Frieseke acknowledged the influence of and his admiration for the art of
Auguste Renoir; certainly his rounded and sensual figural types are very close to those of
the French master.
Marcelle, one of the artist's favorite models, appears in many of his pictures. The
parasol-a literal sun shade-is a very common motif in Frieseke's art; it both protects his
lovely female models and further emphasizes their position as articles of beauty and
recipients of the spectator's gaze. Positioning the female figure on a threshold, between
the interior and the outdoors, between shadow and sunlight, was a favorite motif among
American Impressionists.
As far as the painting known under its present title of Good Morning, but
formerly as In the Doorway, or the alternative, The Neighbor, the picture
projects the ease and comfort of well- established, domestic living, and harmonious
intercourse among sophisticated residents and visitors. This, in fact, reflects the
character of the Giverny art colony by the first two decades of the present century, one
which had little interaction with the local peasant population that had figured so
prominently in the paintings of the 1880s and 1890s by Robinson and his colleagues. For
both their subject matter and their life styles, the later art colony members retreated
within the walls of their increasingly genteel residences.
Frieseke's aesthetic influenced a whole generation of Americans in
Giverny; significantly, almost all of the major figures of this group were from the
Midwest, and like him, had first studied in Chicago; these included Lawton Parker, Louis
Ritman, Karl Anderson, and Karl Buehr. Frieseke's innovative techniques gained him
international fame following his abundant representation in the 1909 Venice BiennaLe, while
he and his colleagues achieved great renown in their native land after successful
exhibitions held in New York City in 1910.
written by WILLIAM H. GERDTS
Many Frieseke posters, prints, note cards, puzzles, address books and catalogs
are available for sale at the Arts Center.
Some of the images on these pages were made possible because of the
kind permission of
Miriam A. Kilmer,
Rising Dove Fine Arts and Services,
http://www.risingdove.com
http://www.shapenotes.com
4503 HAZELTINE CT APT J
Alexandria VA 22312-3203
Please look at the Frieseke books: http://www.risingdove.com/sale/bookstorefrieseke.asp
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