Frederick Carl Frieseke
1874 - 1939
Frederick Carl Frieseke was an American Impressionist painter. He was born in Owosso, Michigan and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before going East to the Art Students League in New York City in 1897, and then the Académie Julian in Paris.
There he studied for a short period at the Academie Carmen with James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Frieseke's earliest works, images of individual women in interiors painted in fairly close tonalities, reflect Whistler's influence.
Frieseke and his wife settled, in 1906 for fourteen years in the art colony at Giverny, which was also home to Monet. He had a great influence on the Americans at the colony there, many of whom shared his Midwestern American background. Frieseke rapidly developed a very original aesthetic which would have an impact upon almost all the later figural painters among the colonists.
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. Frieseke's Impressionism was an unreal construct and his sunlight and color entirely artificial, a stunning concoction of blues and magentas frosted with early summer green and flecks of white.
Frieseke's art has often been identified as "Decorative Impressionism." Contrast with the sparkling color pattern of the garden's blooms, and the two-dimensional effects, ally the work more with the painting of the Post-impressionists than with the perceptual aesthetics of orthodox Impressionism.
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. 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.
Frieseke's aesthetic influenced a whole generation of Americans in Giverny. 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.
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