Loïs Frederick American, 1930-2013

YOUTH AND TRAINING

An American painter, Loïs Frederick was born and grew up in Nebraska. Her works are imbued with the immensity of this part of the American Great Plains region and its contrasting climates. After studying Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska and then at the Kansas City Art Institute, Loïs Frederick arrived in Paris in 1953, having received a Fulbright Award. Unusually she won this grant twice.

AN AMERICAN PAINTER IN PARIS

Living in the Cité Universitaire, she plunged into the effervescence of Post War abstraction in Paris. The art critic Marcel Brion, who followed her work, introduced her to the great artist of lyrical and gestural abstraction Gérard Schneider, who became her husband. Settled permanently in France, Loïs Frederick remained a profoundly American painter. Furthermore, in 1956, she contributed to the exhibition Peintres Abstraits Américains de Paris at the Galerie Arnaud. This was shown first in Paris, and then travelled around Germany. Her paintings also began to enter public collections. In 1953, the Denver Art Museum bought a painting from her and in 1954 in turn the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City acquired one of her works. In 1974, through the Gildas Fardel donation, a painting by Loïs Frederick entered the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nantes.

Loïs Frederick also regularly participated in key art events in Paris: the Salon de la Jeune Peinture (1954-1955), the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (1957-1959), the Salon des Surindépendants (1962), the Salon d’Automne (1970-1983), the Salon Grands et Jeunes d’aujourd’hui (1971-1974). In 1963, she was among the artists represented in the group exhibition L’École de Paris at the Galerie Charpentier. She was also included, alongside Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Niki de Saint Phalle and others, in the group show La Part des femmes dans l’art contemporain shown at Vitry-sur-Seine which, in the 1980s, already highlighted the work of women painters. Loïs Frederick also participated in the leading exhibition for appreciating Lyrical Abstraction: Aspects de l’Art Abstrait des Années 1950, a travelling group show that circulated all over France in 1988-1989, with works by Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Gérard Schneider, Chu Teh-Chun, Zao Wou-Ki, Nicolas de Staël, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva…

COLORFIELD PAINTING

Nothing predestined Loïs Frederick for being a painter and yet early on, she developed an intuition for colour. Influenced by Henri Matisse for his strong chromatic choices and Mark Rothko for the vibrancy of colour and search for light, her art is fully integrated into American Colorfield Painting. She worked in fact using flat areas of colour that she applied in layers. From the agricultural plains of Nebraska, Loïs Frederick was a terrestrial who created in her works a solidly constructed form of abstraction, worked vertically. It is the application of the paint, laid out on the canvas in a slow and controlled process of creation, that structures her work, using the painting technique developed by Hans Hofmann of push and pull, in which colours applied in dense flat areas “emerge from” and “recede” on the support, creating a network of contrasts in the painting. The paintbrush also stops well before the edge of the canvas, creating a network of coloured masses that are simultaneously solidly constructed and create a floating area, suited to a meditative space. With her large coloured fields, Loïs Frederick invites the viewer to an immersive experience in the work: a direct experience with colour, with light, in a space that has no horizon line.

ACRYLIC AND FLUORESCENCE

After using a naturalist palette, at the start of the 1970s Loïs Frederick adopted acrylic and fluorescent paint that allowed her to obtain a very daring range of colours, with great contrasts: shrill, deafening blues, greens, yellows, pinks. However, the saturated colour did not prevent light from emerging from the background.

In 1986, Loïs Frederick lost her husband Gérard Schneider. She then devoted her energy for about fifteen years to promoting his art, moving for a while from being a woman artist to being the wife of an artist. It is a visual impulse, the headlight of a car piercing fog at the start of the 2000s, that brought Loïs Frederick back to painting. Her absolute search for light pushed her to use broad paintbrushes with fluorescent, strident colours against immaculate white backgrounds. Loïs Frederick died in Paris in 2013.