Jane Wilson

Jane Wilson (1924–2015) was an American painter associated with both landscape painting and expressionism.

She lived and worked in New York City and Water Mill, New York.

Wilson was born in Seymour, Iowa on April 29, 1924.

She grew up on a farm there during the Great Depression.

She was the first of two girls born to Wayne Wilson, a civil engineer, and Cleone Margaret Marquis, a teacher, novelist and poet.

Both parents came from farming families.

Wilson attributed her longstanding interest in landscape to her deep relationship with the natural elements as a child in Iowa.

"The landscape was enormously meaningful to me," she said.

"I used to roam around a lot by myself as a child, and when I think of a landscape, I think of the great weight of the sky and how it rests on the earth. And I remember the light. Light is specific to certain places, and what sort of light and landscape formation you grow up with is immensely influential to what you do later on."

The department had previously been chaired by Grant Wood, a painter associated with 1930s Regionalism.

By the 1940s, however, the department looked toward New York City's burgeoning European ex-patriate and American Abstract Expressionist scenes.

Dr. Lester D. Longman reorganized the faculty, which included James Lechay and Philip Guston.

Of her undergraduate experience, Wilson said: "The head of the art department, Lester Longman, would travel to New York, select, and bring back whole exhibitions for our benefit, with painting ranging from the majestic expressionist Max Beckmann to the upstart, Jackson Pollock. Another time, Dr. Longman borrowed a hundred paintings from the Metropolitan Museum, hung them all over the art department for us to study and live with. So, back in the '40s we were exposed not only to real live masterpieces, but to the first glimmerings of Abstract Expressionism."

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Wilson taught art history at the university for two years.

In 1941, at the age of seventeen, Wilson enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she studied both painting and art history.

In 1949, Wilson moved to New York City with her husband John Jonas Gruen, who had been a fellow student.

In New York City and on Long Island, Wilson became professionally and personally involved with a group of painters and poets (sometimes referred to as the New York School).

Among the artists were Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher, and among the poets were James Schuyler, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.

In her painting, Wilson began to move toward abstraction and away from her academic training.

During the 1950s, Wilson also worked as a fashion model to help support her career as an artist.

As a model, Wilson recognized the technical expertise and sculptural artistry involved in fashion design.

Others in the art world, however, may have regarded this pursuit as "unseemly for a serious artist."

Wilson defended her intellect by mentioning her years in academia.

By the mid-1950s, Wilson was increasingly focusing on producing expressionist landscapes.

In 1952, she began exhibiting with two cooperative galleries: Tanager Gallery and Hansa Gallery, where she was a founding member.

Of this period, Wilson said: "In 1956 and 7, I found myself in one of those lucid moments that occurs every twenty years and I realized I wasn't a second generation Abstract Expressionist. I looked at the ingredients of what I was painting and felt an uncontrollable allegiance to subject matter, and to landscape in particular."

In 1960, pop artist Andy Warhol commissioned Wilson to paint his portrait, Andy and Lilacs.

Wilson appeared in one of Warhol's famous Screen Tests (films) and was included in his film 13 Most Beautiful Women.

In 1960, Wilson and her husband bought a carriage house with a large hayloft in Water Mill, NY on Long Island.

In the late 1960s, Wilson increasingly painted still lifes, continuing through the 1970s.

In 1961, Wilson described her painting process in Art in America magazine:

"My paintings are done mostly from memory. After making simple indications of mass and movement, I start painting from the top down in thin color washes, working into it with paint a little thicker. While painting landscape, my feeling is that the detail and the mass are built on varieties of paint application, but when a painting is finished, these details have somehow become recognizable things. It is always a surprise to me how specific my paintings are. What I remember as color and paint put in a particular area of the painting because they were needed, has somehow become identifiable landscape elements. Figure and still life, however, are more aggressive as subject matter. Here my impulse is to pull the background as far forward as possible, to push the subject back into it; to reduce the specific—to insist on the paint and the painting."

Of her early work, Stuart Preston wrote: "[Jane Wilson] is a hedonist in paint, employing a plethora of strokes and bright colors that sometimes fall into still-lifes and figures but usually do not."

In 1970, Wilson and her family appeared in Alice Neel's painting The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia).

Wilson's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

In the early 1980s, she returned to painting landscapes.

In 2002, Wilson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York.

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith praised Wilson's recent work in 2009: "DC Moore Gallery is showing Jane Wilson's latest luminous landscapes, which may be her best. They relegate land or water to a low-lying narrow strip to let light and clouds work their soft magic. The real subject here is color, which may make Ms. Wilson a postabstract Color Field painter."

Elisabeth Sussman has commented on the position of Jane Wilson's paintings in the present day: "What I find so remarkable about confronting Jane Wilson's paintings in the twenty-first century is how elegaic they look and how they simultaneously recall the poetic sensibilities of mid-century, when the syntax was kept simple, when everyday renditions of land and sky or of ordinary life could be at once benevolent and metaphysical--simple situations redolent of the vagaries and complexities of the day-to-day."

Wilson died on January 13, 2015, in New York City, aged 90.