Outside, Inside

Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939) was a painter who shows up in the books as a solid second-tier American Impressionist with a talent for representing women en plein air . If you want to scratch beneath the surface of Frieseke’s career, which is well worth doing, visit the San Diego Museum of Art, where the artist’s first full-scale retrospective opened last week.

But don’t go expecting only what’s promised by the history books and by the exhibition’s tagline, “The Evolution of an American Impressionist.”

That teaser must have been written by someone other than the show’s curator, someone with the marketing savvy to suggest--however wrongly--that Frieseke’s career builds toward a single culminating event, in this case the pleasant, ever-popular spectacle of Impressionism.

Frieseke’s story is not that one-dimensional, even if sometimes his paintings are. He did paint outdoors for much of his life, smitten by the play of color and sunlight, but Impressionism, with its love of surface effects, was only one of two strong currents running through his work. The other, hinted at early in his career and dominant in his final decade, favors more internal concerns. Far more subdued in palette and mood, Frieseke’s late style can be gripping in its emotional directness.

Frieseke was born in a small town in Michigan in the same year that Impressionism made its public debut in Paris. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, he traveled to Europe in 1897 for further instruction and inspiration. He toured Holland and Germany a bit but settled in France, where he remained for most of the next 40 years.

Like boatloads of young American artists before him, he got the requisite training in drawing from live models. Frieseke also studied under fellow expatriate James McNeill Whistler, master of the narrow tonal range and champion of the Japonesque.

Frieseke’s retrospective--organized by Nicholas Kilmer (a writer and the artist’s grandson) for the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah--progresses chronologically and, even among his earliest works, one can see both currents of the artist’s career in action. In the understated, sensuous “Helene” (1901), Frieseke pictures a woman seated indoors, her blouse casually askew, one hand to her chin. Painted thinly in browns, grays and greens, the image reads as a penetrating portrait of a strong personality.

Hanging adjacent is the much slighter “Reflections,” which also shows a woman seated indoors, but here all energy is channeled toward external appearance. She is formally dressed and sitting stiffly, raising a hand-mirror to check if all is in order. Frieseke’s stroke here, too, is one of superficial vitality: short, dappled, diffused.

Frieseke painted this Impressionist bonbon sometime before 1908 but probably after 1905, when he began spending summers in Giverny, the home of Monet and a well-established colony of American followers.

Calling his working style of the Giverny period “not theoretical but a matter of enthusiasm,” he painted women taking tea in the garden or adjusting their parasols, giving himself over to the beauty of shifting light on the surface of skin, water, flowers. In his outdoor nudes, Frieseke treated the skin itself like a canvas, a vehicle responsive to the slightest touch or transient shadow. He was not interested in detail, he said, but in “vibration,” in stimulating the optic nerve.

The eye does keep busy in Frieseke’s Impressionist paintings, even if the mind lies dormant. Occasionally the visual rewards are sufficient in themselves, as in “Lady in a Garden” (1912), in which the surface shimmers from edge to edge with heat and light. The stripes of the woman’s dress interlace with stems of flowers at her feet, creating a kind of visual kindling. Here, Frieseke’s love of decorative patterning injects energy into an image that would otherwise fall into the same category of bland geniality occupied by so many of his other works.

After the war and after the birth of his only child, Frieseke’s work ceased to be merely clever and began to feel wise.

No longer were his models treated simply as part of an overall decorative scheme. Now they assumed the full-bodied presence of thinking, acting beings. His daughter, Frances, stares at us in a portrait from the 1920s with a self-possession that startles. Her direct gaze seems to demand something of us that Frieseke’s earlier work left comfortably untouched.

In “Portrait of a Woman (With Cactus)” (1930), his subject’s melancholy stare is utterly involving. Frieseke has pared down all of his means--the thickness of his paint, the range of his palette--and produced a painting with soul.

How, internally, Frieseke moved from a traditional conception of woman as pretty prop to this insistently 20th century take is a compelling mystery not fully examined in the show’s catalog. Certainly the shift had already permeated the general culture, and the art world, by this time. Frieseke, who was credited in the New York Times just a dozen years earlier with having “the last word in the style that was modern before the Modernists came along,” had developed a modern sensibility of his own. He made the shift from Impressionism to realism, from major to minor key.

The more introspective character of his late work is epitomized by a self-portrait dated before 1938. An earlier portrait (painted by Karl Anderson in 1910) shows a rosy-cheeked Frieseke outdoors in Giverny, his easel before him, a nude model to one side and all surrounding space verdant and alive. In the late self-portrait, the artist sits in a dimly lighted room before a mirror, his face barely emerging from warm brown shadow.

This show does, indeed, trace Frieseke’s evolution--but as a sober realist. But how snazzy an exhibition title is that?

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San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, (619) 232-7931, through Nov. 11. Closed Mondays.