7 May is Suzy Frelinghuysen’s
birthday, she was born in 1911.
Suzy Frelinghuysen was an abstract painter in the USA before
the country had any great tradition of abstract art. She and her husband, George L.K.Morris, were founding
members of American Abstract Artists and also of a smaller group which became
known as the Park Avenue Cubists. Their influences came from Europe. Morris was
also a member of Abstraction-Création-Art Non-Figuratif, a group formed by important European abstractionists
including Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp. Suzy Frelinghuysen adapted cubist, mixed media
and collage styles into her work, with an emphasis on musical and operatic
motifs, because Suzy was also a singer. |
| Suzy Frelinghuysen in her studio |
During her
childhood, Suzy was privately tutored in art and music. She also visited Europe a number of times, although
she was not particularly aware of European cubism at the time. Originally a
realist painter, she said that she really became interested in trying abstraction
after her marriage to painter and sculptor, George L.K. Morris. She adopted the
cubist style and her paintings were described as bringing humour and elegance
to synthetic cubism.
Synthetic cubism
was an evolution of Picasso and Braque’s original, Analytical cubism’. The Synthetic
form of cubism simplified the image, flattened the picture plane and often incorporated
textual and textural elements. Collage
became a part of these compositions and Suzy Frelinghuysen’s work combined all these
elements with enthusiasm and agility. She exhibited in Paris, Rome and
Amsterdam as well as in the US.
She was a founding
member of the American Abstract Artists group (as was Morris) and exhibited
with them annually. She was the first woman artist to have work exhibited at
the Museum of Living Art, the precursor to MOMA, in New York. In the early 1940’s
she returned to the classroom and attended the Art Students’ League of New York,
where she studied fresco painting.
She and George
Morris had built a modernist masterpiece of a house in the Berkshires, Western
Massachusetts and Suzy’s new talent for fresco painting helped to decorate the walls
of her home. Today the house is a museum dedicated to its owners’ art and
spirit of modernism.
Suzy Frelinghuysen
also had a career as an opera singer with the New York City Opera from 1947-51.
She received critical acclaim, being described as a “Sumptuous dramatic soprano.”
She starred in Ariadne of Naxos and Tosca and, though she loved the music, she suffered
severely from stage fright. She retired after a serious attack of bronchitis.
She was always passionate about music and her singing career, though brief,
continued to influence her art.
She appears to have
run these two diverse careers alongside each other and emphasised the
similarities in concerns for the arrangement of forms in painting and in opera.
Some of her paintings take operatic themes, for example, Composition –
Toreador 1944 and in her collages using fragments of musical scores and
opera programs.
As a collector and
an artist, Suzy Frelinghuysen helped to introduce the art of the European
avant-garde into the USA. She seldom exhibited her paintings after 1951, although
she continued painting up until her death in 1988. Despite the eclipse of her
art since the 1950’s era of abstract expressionism, today Suzy Frelinghuysen’s
art is beginning to attract new interest. Her work is in collections in the USA,
including at her home in Massachusetts.
*
My thanks to the Frelinghuysen
Morris House & Studio, www.frelinghuysen.org
You can read about each of the 31 women as their birthdays arrive, earlier ones will remain on this blog.
You can read about each of the 31 women as their birthdays arrive, earlier ones will remain on this blog.
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