Emily Mason In Memoriam
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Emily Mason In Memoriam
Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Outshines the Moon, 2018 oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in
Emily Mason: In Memoriam And tho’ I’m scarce accounted, My Art, a Summer Day – had Patrons – Once – it was a Queen – And once – a Butterfly – -Emily Dickinson
The death of Emily Mason last December at the age of 87 left the art world mourning the loss of one of its great figures of color abstraction. Mason’s was an innovative and personal form of lyrical abstraction, one that used color as a vibrant means to express the poetic resonances of beauty she observed in the world. Over a six-decade career Mason evolved her singular style of gracefully expressive painting in which her deep love of nature was depicted in layered hues and rhythms of vibrant colors. These she fortuitously arranged in compositions inspired from her heart as much as from her mind. Emily Mason was one of the first artists invited to join LewAllen Galleries’ roster when Bob Gardner and I bought LewAllen Galleries nearly two decades ago. We have been proud to exhibit her work continuously at the gallery since that time. Not only was she a consummately masterful artist but also a person full of a rare sort of humanity. We will truly miss her wit, her warmth, her kindness, her amazing knowledge, her giggles and pigtails – and most of all her true friendship. We were fortunate also to become friends with and show the work of Mason’s husband, the renowned abstracted landscape painter Wolf Kahn. Sadly, the art world lost him as well, in March of this year at the age of 92, shortly after Mason’s death. Emily Mason: In Memoriam honors our special relationship with this extraordinary artist. The exhibition is the ninth major solo show of Mason’s work presented by the gallery and includes a selection of more than 30 recent paintings on canvas created from 1987 through 2019, including some of her last works. The show will go on view at LewAllen Galleries on Friday, September 4, 2020, and will extend through Saturday, October 17. 2
Mason’s art is revered for its whole-hearted celebration of color. Experimenting boldly with its potential to engender an emotional and cerebral response, Mason in particular investigated the visual effects of veiling her colors through layers of diluted paint and various levels of opacity. Rather than approaching her paintings with any preconceived notion about their direction, Mason instead found joy in her personal process of discovery on canvas. She believed that above all her paintings must provide a singular experience, one which might contain the same feelings of discovery and joy as we might imagine she felt in their creation. Mason’s measure of success was what she called “the happy accident,” unexpected but immediately satisfying results from a process that was intuitive more than planned, and spontaneous more than considered. She observed, “I work in terms of transparencies, flooding one color on top of another.” In making her paintings, Mason mixed her observations with her emotions, just as she mixed her paints. The confluence of all these things gave rise, at her hand, to the extraordinary pictorial inventions that became her gloriously colored paintings. She would begin by applying thinned paints, tilting and turning the canvas, allowing the paint to run and flow, pouring and creating layers and veils of diaphanous or saturated color and using fluidity as much as any brush to create by chance the forms and hues that comprised her serendipitous compositions. As she poured, stained and brushed her pigments, she was on the hunt for new discovery. About this she said, “It’s a process of letting the painting talk to you.… I want a painting to take me to a place I’ve never been.” A Mason painting might take months, even years, to complete. And “completion” was a somewhat ephemeral thing: at some point the painting might signal a visceral sense of grace and glory, enough so that the artist might stop. Mason embraced the notion that one of the great values of art resides in the observer. A common reaction by viewers of her chromatically exciting paintings is that her work makes them happy. And as Agnes Martin, another legend of American art, observed about painting, “happiness is the goal, isn’t it?” Without question, Mason’s work demonstrates her remarkable ability to achieve that result, to catch in her painting the joy of a vivid sunset, the 3
delight of birdsong in summer, the thrill of a flower’s fragrance, the pleasure of a hummingbird’s aerobatics – and every other manner of life’s best exhilarations. It is the extraordinary quality of expression in Mason’s work that captures the essence of the beautiful. She succeeded in relating on canvas her own exhilarations and then engendering in others feelings of delight from the spontaneous interplay of her personal experiences conjoined with color and form. Out of this amalgamation of sensibility and material came paintings that have the capacity to stimulate deep and moving feelings -- even of the spiritual. Her paintings are so radiant of beauty that they seem more poetry than pigment. Reflecting on her remarkable constancy of artistic vision and feeling, there is a sense in which her oeuvre seems as much an epic love poem to the divine in nature as it does a body of vibrantly hued paintings. Each work is like an eloquent stanza of jubilant grace and refined elegance, complete within itself, but all the more brilliant as part of a lifetime of works shared generously with the world. The idea of Mason’s paintings being of the poetic is perhaps especially appropriate in light of the connections to Emily Dickinson. Mason was named after the poet, Dickinson was always her favorite bard, and Mason often titled her paintings after phrases in Dickinson poems. Mason passed away on Dickinson’s birthday, shortly after being read some of her most cherished Dickinson poems. Mason was a gentle soul with a delightful, spritely aura of equanimity that is reflected in the inner glow of beauty so evident in her paintings. She was born in 1932 into a resolutely artistic family. Her mother was the well-known New York School abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason, who was also a founding member of the important American Abstract Artists group in New York. One of her forebears was the prominent Revolutionary War portrait painter John Trumbull. Her father was a sea captain. As a child, Mason was frequently in the company of avant-garde artists who were friends of her mother. Milton Avery often babysat for her, and such notables as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt and Joan Miró were frequent household visitors. Mason graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art and then studied at 4
Bennington College before attending and graduating from the Cooper Union. She spent 1956-58 in Italy on a Fulbright grant for painting and, for part of that time, studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice. In Venice she acquired her abiding deep love for Italy and Italian Renaissance art. During Mason’s two-year stay in Italy, she married the painter Wolf Kahn in 1957, whom she had met earlier in New York and with whom she would raise two children. Mason has had numerous exhibitions of her work since her first one-person show at the Area Gallery in New York City in 1960. Mason and her art are the subjects of two excellent monographs: Emily Mason: The Fifth Element (George Braziller, 2006) and Emily Mason: The Light in Spring (University Press of New England, 2015). She is also the subject of a 2018 documentary film entitled Emily Mason: A Painting Experience, produced by RAVA Films. Mason’s love of nature and the beauty she found everywhere in it pervades her work. Her experience of being in nature animated a liveliness that is enduringly present in her paintings, made manifest by her masterful innovation of unique pictorial structures based on color and the intuitively spontaneous manner with which she applied paint. There is in her work a quiet energy reflective of her own spirit that seemed always to evince a refreshing lightness of being that overlaid a resolute intensity of technique. The result of this convergence in Mason’s art might be called the visual form of an extreme love. Mason approached abstraction from the standpoint of delight, curiosity, and creative innovation rather than the anger or angst that frequently inspired the first generation of AbEx painters. Her approach exquisitely exemplified what became known as Lyrical Abstraction. The facility she evolved for using color and abstraction to create a unique visual language brought to the world art that reflects the beauty Mason observed in life and especially in nature. It is these resonances that impart to her work the enduring power to connect with her viewers and their memories and experiences, and to sustain a sense of joy and happiness in her paintings. Thinking about her legacy, one is tempted to make associations between Mason’s deep engagement with the natural world and a kind of contemporary Transcendentalism. American 5
Transcendentalism was the spiritual and theological philosophy that began in New England in the early 19th century. It held that nature provided direct connection to the divine. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were among its adherents and authored works articulating its ideas. Painters such as the great Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church have been associated with its central view that the awesome power and infinity of nature suggested the presence of the divine. Certainly these ideas correspond with Mason’s view that nature was itself a sacred place. Her wonder at its beauty and the sense of awe it inspired in her was akin to an aesthetic theology of pure joy carried through to her paintings. Many have observed that her paintings seem like spiritual landscapes rather than landscapes in any literal sense. In this regard, she aspired in her work to express her experience and sensations of being in a landscape rather than to paint a picture of the place itself. And she was pleased when an observer of her work felt a more intense experience of the spirit of nature as a result of her efforts. Mason deeply loved the land. She walked in the gardens on her Vermont farm, viewed the rolling hills that surrounded it, watched the countryside roll by as she was driven between New York and Vermont. She loved Italy. She studied art and was married in Venice. She spent time painting there with her husband Wolf Kahn, and traveled the country. Thereafter her love of Italy was so great she came back nearly every year. One of her favorite places was Siena where she was captivated by the frescos of Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico, especially “The Allegory of Good and Bad Government,” which stands as a reminder to public decision-makers about what is at stake in the integrity of making good decisions, something that very much concerned Mason. All of these experiences – her close observation of the world around her and her zeal for exploration and discovery of the new – influenced Mason’s sensibilities as she painted. Her paintings became terrains themselves. They are places one can enter visually and feel comforted by, or even dream in. They are worlds apart and yet realms of intimacy for those who look closely the way Mason did. In the looking one can become happily lost in time, range in delight across surfaces of infinite interest and variety, visit the beautiful and maybe even feel 6
the divine. To the very end of her life, Mason retained the passion to find the “new” and the “rightness” in her work. She pursued with an enduring sense of ardency her passion to express those resonances of the beautiful that she sought to share with others. Mason leaves an indelible artistic legacy of extraordinary excellence encompassed in a remarkable oeuvre reminding the world that within the boundaries of a stretched canvas color can enliven the spirit and stir the heart. - Kenneth R. Marvel
Emily Mason, 1966 7
Photo by Sam Millstein
Icharus, 2019, oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches
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The Red Eye, 2019, oil on canvas, 34 x 20 inches
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What's Left of the Rainbow, 1988, oil on canvas, 52 x 48 inches 10
Sky Watch, 2018, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches 11
Cape Rosier, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 32 inches 12
Double Infusion, 2017, oil on canvas, 42 x 32 inches 13
Cross Walk, 2018, oil on canvas, 28 x 24 inches 14
Flagstaff, 2018, oil on canvas, 28 x 24 inches 15
Direction Home, 2018, oil on canvas, 52 x 38 inches
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Fire Ebbs, 2018, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches
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Look Out, 2016, oil on canvas, 38 x 34 in
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The Two Are One, 2018, oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches
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Swing Low, 2018, oil on canvas, 34 x 24 inches
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Winter Garden, 1995, oil on canvas, 54 x 50 inches
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Jane's Garden, 1990, oil on canvas, 56 x 54 inches
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Not So Much As, 1988, oil on canvas, 44 x 44 inches
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Off Guard, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 26 inches
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Outshines the Moon, 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches
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See Through, 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches 26
Sundown Crept, 1987, oil on canvas, 60 x 52 inches 27
Spruce, 2018, oil on canvas, 26 x 24 inches
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Fragile Wind, 2011, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 44.125 inches
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Hand of Scarlet, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 34 inches
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Red Carpet, 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches
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Held Tight, 2018, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
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Sapphire Pool (Aquatic), 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 26 inches
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Hoped For, 2018, oil on canvas, 28 x 24 inches
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Invested, 2018, oil on canvas, 28 x 22 inches
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Down So Close, 1988, oil on canvas, 50.25 x 42.5 inches
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EMILY MASON (1932-2019) b.1932 New York City, NY
1997
MB Modern, New York, NY
d.2019 Brattleboro, VT
1996
Thomas Babeor Gallery, San Diego, CA
1995
Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT
2020
Thomas Babeor Gallery, San Diego, CA
2018-19 To Another Place, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center,
1994
Walker-Kornbluth Gallery, Fair Lawn, NJ
Brattleboro, VT
1993
Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT
2018
Inner Resources, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
1992
Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY
2017
Mitchell Giddings Gallery, Brattleboro, VT
1991
Aba Gallery, Lebanon, NJ
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY
Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI
2016
Ripple Effect, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
Webb and Parsons Gallery, Burlington, VT
2015
Recent Paintings, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
1990
Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY
2014
Opened Jars, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
Associated American Artists, New York, NY
Works on Paper, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
1989
Kornbluth Gallery, Fair Lawn, NJ
2013
Recent Paintings, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
1987
Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY
2012
Summer’s Response, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
1984
Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2011
David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY
2010
Color Revelations, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
1983
Wentz Gallery, Pacific Northwest College of Art,
2009
David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
Portland, OR
2008
Contemplating Color, LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
1982
Hamilton Gallery, Charleston, SC
The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX
1977
Landmark Gallery, New York, NY
2007
David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
1976
Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT
2006
Directions, LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
1972
Gallery North, Setauket, New York, NY
2005
Recent Paintings, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
1970
Dorothy Marvin Memorial Library, Windham College,
The Art of Emily Mason, Ogunquit Museum of American Art,
Putney, VT
Ogunquit, ME
1968
Windham College, Putney, VT
Instinctive Color, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center,
1962
Area Gallery, New York, NY
Brattleboro, VT
1961
Area Gallery, New York, NY
2004
Paintings, LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy
Selected Public Collections
2003
Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, CT
Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
2001
MB Modern, New York, NY
National Academy Museum, New York, NY
Marian Graves Mugar Gallery, Colby-Sawyer College,
New Britain Museum, New Britain, CT
New London, NH
Springfield Museum, Springfield, MA
2000
Spheris Gallery, Walpole, NH
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
1999
MB Modern, New York, NY
In Memoriam, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
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Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland
Emily Mason, 2018
Photo by Joshua Farr, Courtesy of Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com Š 2020 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC 40 Artwork Š Estate of Emily Mason