Among women artists in the 1950s, Jane Freilicher (born 1924) cast an alluring figure. Poet Kenneth Koch recalled that “I never enjoyed conversation with anyone so much in my life.” Both Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler wrote poems for her. And the jazz musician Larry Rivers gave up music for art after meeting her; when she left him after a love affair, he attempted suicide.

Nell Blaine was also part of the New York circle, living on Twenty-First Street, and her loft became an informal salon for the group. Her likeness of Freilicher—one woman artist portraying another—was made early in her career, when her work was more representative; it became more abstract as she went on. Blaine contacted polio in 1959, but she continued to paint even when confined to a wheelchair.