Jane Wilson

Jane Wilson (1924-2015) was a celebrated American painter whose luminous landscapes and important role in the postwar New York art world secured her a substantial place within twentieth century American painting. In 1952, at the legendary Cedar Tavern where the abstract expressionists gathered, Wilson was invited to become a co-founder of the Hansa Gallery, an artists' cooperative that opened on East 12th Street before relocating to Central Park South. Her fellow founding members included Jan Müller, Richard Stankiewicz, Wolf Kahn, Allan Kaprow, and Felix Pasilis, and Wilson went on to have three solo exhibitions at Hansa in 1953, 1955, and 1957.

During these formative years, Wilson participated in significant group exhibitions, including a late 1952 show at the Tanager Gallery, another of the most active cooperatives of the period, and three annual exhibitions from 1953 to 1955 at the Stable Gallery on West 58th Street. The Stable Annuals of the mid-1950s were major events that brought together established figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning alongside younger artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Helen Frankenthaler. Wilson was working in an abstract expressionist idiom at this point, producing work that reflected the vitality of the moment, before shifting later in the decade toward expressionist landscapes. Among the many artists she encountered during these years, the older and more established Fairfield Porter became especially important to her, and his commitment to modernist representational painting encouraged her own return to landscape.

Wilson's career gained substantial momentum in the early 1960s. The Museum of Modern Art acquired her large landscape The Open Scene in 1960, and Andy Warhol commissioned her to paint his portrait, Andy and Lilacs, which he subsequently donated to the Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year she joined Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which represented a circle of her friends and other primarily young painters, including Frankenthaler, Porter, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, and Nell Blaine.

In the early 1980s, Wilson returned again to landscape painting and developed the distinctive approach for which she is best known today, producing luminous works that hover between abstraction and representation, inspired by the sky, sea, and land surrounding Water Mill on eastern Long Island. In 1999 she joined DC Moore Gallery, where she went on to hold seven solo exhibitions over the following fifteen years. In addition to her painting practice, Wilson was a visiting professor at colleges and universities across the country, including a thirteen-year tenure at the Columbia University School of Art, where she served as Acting Chair from 1986 to 1988. Her work is held in many major museum collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.