Frederick Carl Frieseke

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Self-portrait , 1901
Summer , 1914, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Frederick Carl Frieseke (born April 7, 1874 in Owosso , Michigan , † August 28, 1939 in Le Mesnil-sur-Blangy , Calvados ) was an American painter.

The artist lived mainly in France , where he worked for a few years in the American artists' colony in Giverny . Representations of women, which he placed in interiors or garden scenes, are characteristic of his work. With his pictures, which show the reflections of sunlight in a colorful way, he is one of the main representatives of American Impressionism .

Life

The Green Sash , 1904, Terra Foundation for American Art

Frederick Carl Frieseke was born in the small town of Owosso in Shiawassee County , Michigan in 1874 . His older sister Edith was born in 1872. The paternal grandparents came from Pritzerbe in Brandenburg and had emigrated to the United States in 1858. The father Herman (Hermann) Carl Frieseke founded a brickworks with his brother Julius in Owosso . The mother Eva Graham died in 1880 when Frederick Carl Frieseke was only six years old. From 1881 to 1885 the family lived in Jacksonville , Florida , where the father built another brick factory. Back in Owosso, Frederick Carl Frieseke grew up with various relatives. His grandmother Viletta Gould Graham worked as a decorative painter in a furniture factory and supported her grandson's artistic talent at an early age.

In 1893, Frieseke finished school and attended the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago . In the same year he decided on an artistic education, which he began at the Art Institute of Chicago and continued in 1896 at the Art Students League of New York . He had already started drawing caricatures in Chicago. In New York he was able to sell such humorous drawings to newspapers such as Puck , Truth and the New York Times .

Frieseke went to France in 1897, where, apart from a few visits to his homeland, he lived until his death. He continued his education in Paris in 1898 at James McNeill Whistler's Académie Carmen and at the Académie Julian and took lessons from Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens . Despite this diverse painting training, Frieseke described himself as an autodidact and named Henri Fantin-Latour and Pierre-Auguste Renoir as role models.

Woman with a Mirror , 1911, Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of his sponsors was Rodman Wanamaker , son of the American department store owner John Wanamaker . Rodman Wanamaker was president of the American Art Association of Paris , which Frieseke joined and exhibited in 1900. Rodman Wanamaker also commissioned Frieseke illustrations for the catalog of the American department store group Wanamaker's .

Nude Seated at Her Dressing Table, 1909, Smithsonian American Art Museum

From 1901 Frieseke exhibited regularly at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. During the summer of the year he visited Le Pouldu on the Atlantic. In 1904 Frieseke achieved his artistic breakthrough. He received a silver medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis , and his painting The Green Sash found a prominent buyer in William Merritt Chase . The French state also acquired the painting Devant la glace (In front of the mirror ) for the Musée du Luxembourg . In addition, Frieseke began on behalf of Rodman Wanamaker on wall decorations for the department store Wanamaker's in New York (demolished 1956). Also for Wanamaker in 1906 he created further decorative paintings for the dining room of the Shelburne Hotel in Atlantic City . In 1906 and 1907 he traveled to the United States to install these murals.

In 1905 Frieseke married Sarah Anne O'Bryan, an American who lived with her family in Paris and whom he had known since 1898. From this marriage in 1914 the daughter Frances Edith Frieseke was the only child. At the beginning of the 20th century, Frieseke exhibited his work in exhibitions in other European countries and the United States as well as in Paris, where he received several awards. So he took part in the international art exhibition in Munich in 1904 and received a gold medal. He showed his pictures in 1905 and 1909 at the Venice Biennale, where he was represented with 17 works. In addition to other exhibitions in Pittsburgh, Rome and Mannheim, he repeatedly exhibited his pictures at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he was awarded the Temple Gold Medal in 1913. Another gold medal followed during the 1915 World's Fair in San Francisco; a year earlier, Frieseke was elected a member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design in New York .

Frieseke's friends included a group of American painters who lived in France. In addition to the African American Henry Ossawa Tanner , these were Richard Miller , Karl Anderson , Lawton S. Parker , Guy Rose and Edmund Greacen . With the exception of Tanner, all of the painters mentioned worked in the American artists' colony in Giverny. Here, where Claude Monet had lived since 1883, various painters had settled since the end of the 1880s and Frieseke belonged to the third generation of these artists. His first visit to this place is not recorded until 1905, but earlier visits from around 1900 are likely. In 1906 he moved into the former home of Theodore Robinson , which was directly adjacent to Monet's property. Frieseke, who also largely had an apartment in Paris, spent the summers here with his family until 1919.

The numerous purchases of his paintings by museums during his lifetime bear witness to the increasing recognition that Friesekes' works enjoyed. In 1910, the Telfair Academy in Savannah acquired his painting Reflections (Marcelle) , and in 1912 the painting Woman with a Mirror ( Femme qui se mire ) came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a gift from Rodman Wanamaker . In 1916, Torn Lingerie was bought by the Saint Louis Art Museum and On the Bank by the Art Institute of Chicago . The Telfair Academy later acquired The Hammock , the Cincinnati Art Museum The Gold Locket , the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Nude Seated, and the Toledo Museum of Art Silhouette .

During the First World War Frieseke stayed with his family in France and served briefly in 1915 in the American hospital in Neuilly . In 1920 he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor . After Frieseke had spent the winter of 1912–1913 in Corsica and he spent the winter of 1918/19 in Roussillon , he left Giverny in the early 1920s and in 1922 bought a house in Le Mesnil-sur-Blangy in the Calvados department on the Channel coast, where he did lived until the end of his life.

plant

Holland , 1898, Shiawassee District Library

Frieseke's early works in Europe included watercolors he painted in the Netherlands in 1898 and in Le Pouldu on the Brittany coast in Le Pouldu or in Étaples on the English Channel in 1899 . He exhibited these watercolors in 1899 at the Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts in Paris. While at the beginning of his Parisian years there were still motifs with views of the parks and boulevards of Paris, he soon turned almost entirely to figure painting. His early main work The Green Sash , the portrayal of a woman in a white dress with a conspicuous green bow, is still painted in tonal colors that clearly refer to James McNeill Whistler as a model. The motif of the quietly absorbed woman from a sophisticated milieu is Friesekes' main theme for the coming decades. In contrast to Theodore Robinson’s work, the rural working population does not appear in Friesekes’s works. There is no social comment whatsoever in Frieseke's work - his pictures are free from problems and fears.

Hollyhocks , around 1912–1913, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

In an interview in 1914, Frieseke described his painting with the thematic limitation "Sunlight, flowers in the sunlight, girls in the sunlight, the nude in the sunlight, that's what has interested me in the last eight years ..." He painted women in the dunes, on the beach or on the bank of a body of water. In the summer garden of Giverny in particular, lush nudes were created under large shady trees with props such as parasols. Although he lived in the immediate vicinity of Monet, it is not so much his influence that can be seen in Friesekes' pictures, but that of Renoir, who also created naked, sensual female bodies en plein air . In Frieseke's light-flooded garden scenes, there are characteristic colorful reflections of the sunlight. Although the numerous nudes created by Frieseke were widely recognized in Europe and the United States, he answered the question why he was living in self-chosen exile in France with the words “Because there ... are not the puritanical restrictions that prevail in America. "

In addition to such garden scenes in which he placed his figure representations, Frieseke repeatedly worked on interiors . In these pictures he showed women in elegant poses in the boudoir or salon with typical female accessories. He showed the sitter in front of the mirror or on the sofa and painted the decoratively floral fabrics of the curtains, wallpapers, upholstery and carpets in delicate colors. In addition to blue tones, pink tones are often found in these light color arrangements, which makes his paintings appear somewhat feminine.

The art magazine The Art Digest ruled in 1932 that "Frieseke is perhaps the most internationally known contemporary American painter". However, this assessment remained rather the exception. His critics found his paintings artistically obsolete by the 1920s at the latest. Especially when compared to the art movements of Fauvism , Expressionism and Cubism , Friesekes' painting after the First World War appears to be less innovative and antiquated. His last works include landscapes and still lifes, which he created in Switzerland in the 1930s.

The paintings by Friesekes are now in the possession of numerous museums in the USA. However, his work is not represented in public collections in German-speaking countries. In the art market, up to 2.3 million US dollars are paid for his oil paintings.

literature

Web links

Commons : Frederick Carl Frieseke  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e exhibition catalog American Impressionism. P. 83.
  2. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "F" / Frieseke, Frederick Carl NA 1914 ( Memento of the original from January 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on June 22, 2015) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalacademy.org
  3. ↑ interviews with Friesekes Clara MacChesney: Frieseke Tells Some of the Secrets of His Art. Appeared in the New York Times on June 7, 1914. Translation from William H. Gerdts: American Impressionism. P. 142.
  4. ↑ Listing on the artcyclopedia website , accessed on December 16, 2011.
  5. ↑ Information from Christie's auction house , accessed on December 16, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Frieseke, Frederick Carl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Owosso , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1939
Place of death Le Mesnil-sur-Blangy , Calvados department