Emily Mason by Miles McEnery Gallery

EMILY MASON

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

Emily Mason in her studio on 20th Street in New York

EMILY MASON: RECENT WORK by Karen Wilkin

It’s stating the obvious, yet it’s still important to note that Emily Mason is an abstract painter who delights in color and revels in the fluidity of her chosen medium. Though her radiant canvases resemble nothing but themselves and, at first acquaintance, can seem to be as much about exploring the expressive possibilities of particular hues as they are about any more easily defined purpose, they are far from arbitrary improvisations. Rather, they seem to be distilled from unnamable but specific experiences. Each painting has an individual mood, a particular emotional and chromatic temperature. Some seem superheated, others are cool and serene, and still others seem to embody lively oppositions. While Mason never fully reveals the trigger—or triggers—that may have provoked a particular image or combination of hues, her responses to these triggers release a host of inchoate associations in the viewer. We think about other painters who similarly intrigue us by means of hard-to-classify constructions with color. Pierre Bonnard immediately comes to mind, as do the late, glowing Japanese bridge paint-

ings of Claude Monet. We search our memories as well for real life encounters with colors in similar relationships, exploring our recollections of qualities of light, times of year, weather, gardens, and the like. Yet in the end, like Mason’s paintings themselves, these connections seem elusive, impossible to pin down. It’s as if her floating sheets of color have only temporarily come together, like drifting clouds, and may change configurations if our attention lapses, eliciting still other associations in us.

Part of the pleasure Mason’s paintings afford resides in this sense of flux. The implied mobility of her pools of color suggests space, even as, with careful looking, we become increasingly aware of the fact of paint on a surface. Her canvases first compel our attention with their radiant hues, but they soon insist that we concentrate on subtleties that reveal the history of the painting’s evolution. We may initially be fascinated by how a saturated pink and an intense red are forced to coexist, or how a different red melts seamlessly into saturated orange, or how a lush blue is loosely applied over yet another red to create an aura of glowing purple, but we are soon caught up in nuances of touch. If we are attentive to these small shifts, each expanse of intense color seems to dissolve into a disembodied cloud of varied transpar-

encies, achieved by a wide range of paint applications—from liquid pours to wiping out to delicate strokes. The multiplicity of edges and inflections these different methods create, where one zone of color meets another and, within the chromatic floods, they act in counterpoint, at a more intimate scale, to the larger structure of Mason’s images, a kind of unwilled “drawing” that animates the picture and allows us to recapitulate, at least in part, how it was made, asserting the presence of the artist herself. None of this happens quickly. Not only do Mason’s paintings imply the passage of time by means of their orchestration of pictorial events at different scales, through their varied densities, and through their associations with different phenomena from the natural world—different seasons and qualities of light, among many other things particular to each individual viewer—but they also demand that we spend time studying them, if we are to experience them fully. This is not to undervalue the excitement of that first, unmediated reaction to Mason’s assemblies of often-unexpected hues. But discovering the unforced complexity of her deceptively straightforward celebrations of color doesn’t diminish that excitement. If anyn thing, it intensifies it. And it keeps us looking. Karen Wilkin is a New York-based independent curator and art critic specializing in 20th-century modernism. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, to Rome. Wilkin has organized numerous exhibitions internationally and is the author of monographs on Anthony Caro, Stuart Davis, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Kenneth Noland, and David Smith, and a contributor to recent books on Fairfield Porter and Wayne Thiebaud. Wilkin teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program of the New York Studio School. She is the Contributing Editor for Art for the Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion and the Wall Street Journal.

Breath of Fresh Air, 2016 Oil on canvas 52 x 50 inches 132.1 x 127 cm

Arctic Ice, 2016 Oil on canvas 39 1/2 x 31 5/8 inches 100.3 x 80.3 cm

Upshot, 2016 Oil on canvas 68 x 52 inches 172.7 x 132.1 cm

Summer Loft, 2016 Oil on canvas 52 x 54 inches 132.1 x 137.2 cm

Support, 2016 Oil on canvas 28 x 22 inches 71.1 x 55.9 cm

Pressure Point, 2016 Oil on canvas 64 x 60 inches 162.6 x 152.4 cm

Snow Drop, 2016 Oil on canvas 26 x 24 inches 66 x 61 cm

Aperture, 2016 Oil on canvas 52 x 48 inches 132.1 x 121.9 cm

By A Thread, 2016 Oil on canvas 38 x 34 inches 96.5 x 86.4 cm

Cold Spell, 2016 Oil on canvas 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Coming Season, 2016 Oil on canvas 24 x 26 inches 61 x 66 cm

East Side, 2016 Oil on canvas 50 x 39 3/8 inches 127 x 100 cm

Rush Hour, 2016 Oil on canvas 38 x 36 inches 96.5 x 91.4 cm

Late Edition, 2016 Oil on canvas 64 x 60 inches 162.6 x 152.4 cm

Ready About, 2016 Oil on canvas 27 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches 69.9 x 59.7 cm

High Line, 2016 Oil on canvas 64 x 60 inches 162.6 x 152.4 cm

Renewable, 2016 Oil on canvas 58 x 52 inches 147.3 x 132.1 cm

Stump Sprout, 2016 Oil on canvas 50 x 39 3/8 inches 127 x 100 cm

Sailor's Delight, 2016 Oil on canvas 50 x 39 3/8 inches 127 x 100 cm

Where the Meanings Are, 2016 Oil on canvas 52 x 72 inches 132.1 x 182.9 cm

CHRONOLOGY

1932 Emily Mason is born in New York City on January 12. Her mother is the artist Alice Trumbull Mason, and her father is Warwood Edwin Mason, a sea captain for American Export Lines. 1934–37 She attends the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village. 1946–50 She attends the High School of Music and Art.

In June 1950, Mason graduates from the High School of Music and Art and enrolls in Bennington College in Vermont. 1952 Mason transfers from Bennington College to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.

enormous impact on Mason and shapes much of her understanding of Western art. In France, she sees the recently discovered Lascaux Caves. In Italy, she sees Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the mosaics in Ravenna, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Mason graduates from Cooper Union in 1955. In the summer of that year, she attends the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art. 1956 Mason is awarded a Fulbright Grant to study in Venice. In April, she meets the artist Wolf Kahn at the Artist’s Club in New York and spends the summer with him in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In the summer, Mason attends the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, where she is particularly influenced by Jack Lenor Larsen’s lecture on analogous color.

In the fall, Mason sets sail for Italy along with other Fulbright scholars, including the artist Lee Bontecou. She then travels to Venice and enrolls in the Accademia di Belle Arti.

1954–55 In the summer of 1954, Mason travels throughout Europe. The trip has an

In December, Mason travels to meet Kahn in Le Havre, France. They visit Paris before returning together to Venice.

Emily Mason in Provincetown, Massachusetts, summer 1964 Photographed by Lenny Slonevsky

1957 In Venice, Mason and Kahn rent the large central room of a palazzo on the Giudecca. They are married in March. In the spring, the couple travels to Rome, where Mason sees the Jackson Pollock show at the Museo d’Arte Moderna. Mason’s paintings earn her a second year of the Fulbright grant.

1958 In April, Mason and Kahn travel to Greece, before spending another summer in Venice. In November, Mason and Kahn set off for the United States, stopping first in Paris and then in Spain. In Madrid, they visit the Prado Museum. They depart for New York from Gibraltar. 1959 Back in New York, Mason and Kahn live in a loft on Broadway and 12th Street. In September, Mason gives birth to a daughter, Cecily. At the end of the year, Mason joins the Area Gallery on 10th Street, an artist-run space. 1960–62 Mason’s first solo exhibition opens at

the Area Gallery in 1960. It features her Venice work. Another two shows follow in 1961 and 1962. In the fall of 1962, Mason returns to Italy with her family. They settle in Milan for the winter. 1964 In March, Mason gives birth to her second daughter, Melany, in Rome. 1965 The family returns to New York. 1968 In the spring, Mason and Kahn purchase a farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont. Mason uses the combined blacksmith’s shop and chicken coop as a studio. 1973 In April, Mason and her family travel to Kenya. They visit Nairobi, the Samburu National Reserve, Lake Naivasha, Malindi, Lamu Island, Masai Mara National Reserve, and Marsabit. 1977 An exhibition of Mason’s work opens at the Landmark Gallery in New York. Two more exhibitions follow in 1978 and 1981.

Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn at their apartment in Giudecca, Venice, Italy, 1958 Photographed by Helen Miljakovich

1979 Mason moves her studio from Broadway to West 20th Street. In the fall, she begins teaching part-time at Hunter College. 1984 A solo exhibition of Mason’s work opens at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York. Mason exhibits with Borgenicht in 1987, 1990, and 1992.

1985 The Associated American Artists gallery commissions a print edition from Mason. She employs a technique suggested by the printmaker Anthony Kirk, using carborundum to establish an image from which to print. 1997 Mason begins to show at the MB Modern Gallery in New York. She exhibits there in 1998, 1999, and 2001. 2001 Mason begins exhibiting at David Findlay Jr Gallery, New York, where she shows regularly through 2015. 2004 A solo exhibition of Mason’s paintings opens at the LewAllen Galleries in Santa

Fe, New Mexico, where she continues to show up through the present. An exhibition of Mason’s prints opens at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. 2005 A solo exhibition of Mason’s prints opens at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Vermont. A solo exhibition of Mason’s paintings opens at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine. 2008 Contemplating Color, a traveling exhibition of Mason’s paintings organized by LewAllen Galleries, is shown at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe and at The Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. 2016 Mason begins exhibiting at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe in New York.

Emily Mason in her studio on 20th Street in New York Photographed by Phong Bui

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

EMILY MASON 5 January – 11 February 2017

Photography by Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9979454-1-6 Cover: Where the Meanings Are (detail), 2016, Oil on canvas, 52 x 72 inches, 132.1 x 182.9 cm

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE