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EMILY MASON
1932 – 2019
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Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to present Emily Mason for the 2021 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.
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Emily MasonLandscapes, Seascapes, Fire Escapes, 1978Oil on canvas54 x 52 inches
137.2 x 132.1 cmSigned and dated: "Emily Mason '78" (lower right recto) -
Emily MasonJuly's Amethyst, 1982Oil on canvas48 1/4 x 52 1/4 inches
122.6 x 132.7 cmSigned and dated: "Emily Mason 1982" (lower right recto) -
Emily MasonMy Iris, 1984 - 1985Oil on canvas52 x 48 inches
132.1 x 121.9 cmSigned and dated: "Emily Mason 1984-1985" (lower left recto) -
Emily MasonUntitled, 1984Oil on canvas48 x 50 1/4 inches
121.9 x 127.6 cmSigned and dated: "Emily Mason '84" (lower right recto)
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Emily Mason in her Vermont Studio, 1986. Photo: Jean E. Davis
"Pigment, in these works, is delicately layered; it is not soaked through the canvas, as in paintings by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, but the paint nevertheless appears to be so flat and fused to the support as to be pre-given—a marvel of technique that led Robert Berlind to write that some of Mason’s paintings “seem for all the world to have occurred without a human agent.”
- Excerpt from "Landscapes, Seascapes, Fire Escapes" by Andrea Gyorody
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Review by Will Heinrich
"Her colors are so splashy, in fact, that I confess they put me off at first. Cascading tides of bright yellows and pinks can easily look garish, and so can the often raggedy edges between them. It takes a little while to get used to the volume and pick out the subtleties. But once you do, you find constructions as delicate and deceptive as spider silk." - Will Heinrich
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Review by Karen Chernik
With a Room of Her Own, Emily Mason’s Ethereal Abstractions Bloomed
Mason’s expansive Chelsea studio became her tuning fork — the barometer she used to check that colors and shapes were humming at the right frequency."Mason tried new things in her Chelsea studio. The paintings she made there were bigger, and on canvas. In the 1960s and 70s she’d worked mostly on paper because “she could shuffle them away when the kids came home,” Rose explains. Once she had an entire floor to cover with works in progress, she could work on canvases in the 50 and 60-inches range. She could even work on ten of these at a time, letting the paint speak to her, as she liked to say." - Karen ChernikRead More -
Emily Mason: A Painting Experience Directed by Rafael Salazar Moreno; produced by RAVA Films. Wolf Kahn Emily Mason Foundation
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Emily Mason in her New York City Studio, 1991. Photo: Tommy Næss
"Making aesthetic decisions with emotive power while shining a light for others was a part of Emily’s self-assigned rigor, and this humanistic approach undoubtedly fueled her remarkable vision."
- Nari Ward -
Review by Chadd Scott
"Mason’s 'joy' and 'wisdom' shine in the 'Chelsea Paintings.' A grouchy, insecure artist could not have created this work. These paintings are the result of an artist deeply in love and committed to her craft, sure of herself and what she is doing." -Chadd Scott
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Emily Mason's New York City Studio, 2020
"Mason pours thinned oil paint on a blank canvas and tilts it this way and that, allowing the pigment to move and settle in. Then she goes on to another work in progress and adds a bit here or there, pouring or applying paint loosely with a brush, blobbing and neatening with a wad of paper towel, using a finger to squidge the paint and transform it from a blob into a subtle, diaphanous veil. Surely she is in charge in these encounters, but she allows for accident and surprise, carefully loosening her control of her materials so that they can do what they will. The tactility of her method requires an intimacy with paint that one only acquires over decades of practice."
- Excerpt from "Landscapes, Seascapes, Fire Escapes" by Andrea Gyorody
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Your Concise New York Art Guide for January
"Known for her vibrant abstractions, painter Emily Mason would toil endlessly in her Chelsea studio, relying upon the solace and plentiful natural light to crank out expressive canvases. This airy environ became her “tuning fork,” where she would go to make or finish many of her most exciting works. Luckily for us, Miles McEnery Gallery is now presenting 22 of them, right in the same neighborhood where they were made." - Dessane Lopez Cassell
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Arts Intel Report
"Her mother, Alice Trumbull, was an on-the-scene painter and a regular Eighth Club attendee in the 1940s and 50s. As an adolescent, Mason met the likes of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko when she attended social engagements at the club. Her occasional babysitter was Elaine de Kooning, who, along with Joan Mitchell, helped propel her toward a career in the arts." -E.C.
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The Critic's Notebook
"Emily Mason: Chelsea Paintings” opens a window onto the sunny compositions the artist developed in her New York loft, in which she worked since 1979." -James Panero
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"Mason’s paintings accommodate the external world not only in their relation to nature but in their consummate openness to others. Though her belief that “when you look at a painting you re-create the painting experience itself" echoes Abstract Expressionism’s emphasis on paint as the trace of an individual encounter, a painting by Mason is more like a perceptual offering to the beholder than a record of process or irretrievable action." -E.B.
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"There is something mystical about Mason’s paintings. 'Often I’ll keep a painting around … until there’s one more twist to add,' she said in a recent interview. “It’s that extra twist, that extra thought, that extra dimension … that magical thing you can’t predict.” She follows her instincts—as she freely allows her pools of paint to slide around the canvas, tipping it side to side with her hands, capturing the otherworldly yet elemental quality, “that magical thing,” without quite knowing how."
- Excerpt from "That Magical Thing: The Poetry of Emily Mason" by Elisa Wouk Almino
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EMILY MASON was born in New York City in 1932. She graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art and studied at Bennington College for two years before attending and graduating from the Cooper Union. She spent 1956-58 in Italy on a Fulbright grant for painting, where she studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice.
During Mason’s two-year stay in Italy she married the painter Wolf Kahn, whom she had met earlier in New York. Mason and Kahn’s daughter, Cecily Kahn, is also an abstract painter, as was Emily Mason’s mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in New York.
Mason spent more than six decades exploring her distinctive vein of lyrical, luminous abstraction. Her paintings executed in oil are distinguished by a sense of intriguing intimacy combined with uncompromising, though gentle, intensity. They evince a sense of structure within open, luminous space and juxtapose robust color harmonies with vivid contrasts that create an engaging optical vibration. Robert Berlind said of her in Art in America, “Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado.”
Mason exhibited steadily throughout her career since she emerged on the Tenth Street gallery scene with multiple exhibitions at the Area Gallery in New York City in the 1960s. In 1979, she was awarded the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize by the National Academy. She taught painting at Hunter College for more than thirty years. Her work has been included in numerous public and private collections.
Emily Mason: The Fifth Element, a comprehensive treatment of her work by Art in America associate managing editor David Ebony, was published in 2006 by George Braziller publishers. A second monograph, Emily Mason: The Light in Spring, was published in 2015 by University Press of New England.
Emily Mason died in December of 2019 in Brattleboro, Vermont.