Frederick Carl Frieseke
was among the group of American Impressionist artists who settled in the French
village of Giverny,
forty miles northwest of Paris.
This group, which lived in Giverny in the early 1900s, is sometimes referred to
as the Giverny Luminists, was attracted to the village by the presence of the
great French Impressionist Claude Monet, who had settled there in 1883.
Frieseke was born on
April 7, 1874 in Owosso, Michigan and began his professional life as
an illustrator. Deciding to become a painter, he studied first at the Art
Institute of Chicago from 1893 to 1896 followed by a year of instruction at the
Art Students League of New York. He went to France
to further his education, arriving in Paris
in 1897. He worked in the atelier of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and
Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. He also received criticism, if not
formal instruction, from Auguste-Joseph Delecluse, and he studied very
briefly--perhaps for only one week--in James McNeill Whistler's Académie Carmen.
Nonetheless, Whistler's influence on Frieseke's developing style was strong.
Frieseke absorbed the great master’s appreciation for the "infinite
gradation" of color that was possible through paint. The flattened space and
flowing line of the Art Nouveau style were also significant influences in this
formative period of the artist's career.
By 1901, the first year a
Paris address is known for Frieseke, he was
residing at 51, boulevard Saint-Jacques in the Montparnasse
quarter, an area favored by American artists. He was within a few short blocks
of Delecluse's atelier and the Académie Carmen. He achieved his first successes
with paintings of the nude, one of which was purchased by the French Government
in 1904. Parisian parks and boulevards and summer landscapes painted in the
country rounded out his oeuvre at the turn of the 20th century.
Frieseke is believed to
have visited Giverny as early as 1900; a summer visit in 1905 is documented;
and in 1906 he and his wife moved into a two-story cottage that adjoined the
property of Claude Monet. At Giverny his colleagues included the American
painters Guy Rose, Lawton Parker, Edmund Greacen, and Richard E. Miller, with
whose work Frieseke's is often compared. While he maintained an apartment and
studio in Paris
all his life, Giverny was Frieseke's summer residence for fourteen years. Once
settled there, Frieseke began to create luminous paintings depicting both interiors
and outdoor garden scenes, skillfully combining both solidly rendered figures
and his interest in overall patterning. Frieseke's palette during his Giverny
period primarily consisted of greens, blues and violets, dazzling golds and
oranges, and creamy whites, which capture and reflect the brilliant summer
sunlight.
In 1920, Frieseke bought
a summer home at Le Mesnil-sur-Blangy in Normandy
and left the Giverny art colony. He commenced production of a large group of
canvases representing frontally posed female figures, most often using his
daughter Frances as model. The palette is darker than that of his Giverny period
and shows more interest in qualities of chiaroscuro as he explored less
brilliant light effects. Works painted after 1920 evidence a great deal of
control on Frieseke's part, which, combined with the deeper palette, contribute
to a sense of psychological awareness and intensity.
Frieseke exhibited
extensively throughout his lifetime, both in the United
States and in his adopted France. He earned a medal from the
St. Louis Exposition of 1904; the Temple Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts in 1913; a prize at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
of 1915; and the William A. Clark Award from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
1935. His dealer in the United
States was William Macbeth, who regularly
displayed his work in one-man and group exhibitions. Frieseke died on August
28, 1939, a few months after a major retrospective of his work opened at the Grand Central
Art Galleries
in New York City.
Frieseke’s work is
represented in the permanent collections of the Telfair Museum of Art,
Savannah, Georgia; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
Museo d’Art Moderna de Ca’Pesaro, Venice; and the Terra Museum of American Art,
Chicago.
© Copyright 2007 Hollis Taggart Galleries