by Emily Burkhart
February 29, 2024
Emily Mason (1932-2019), Pleasure Garden, 1970. Oil on canvas, 52 x 44 in. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of Artsy.
During a career spanning more than six decades, the American painter and printmaker Emily Mason (1932-2019) explored abstraction in works that combined vibrant color with gestural expression. Saturating the canvas with intense hues and bold tones, she created color-centric abstract compositions. Her paintings bridged Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and the Color Field movements. She exhibited both nationally and internationally beginning in the 1960s. In 1979, she was selected for a Ranger Fund Purchase Prize by the National Academy of Design.
Mason described her process as “want[ing] to use the medium as directly as possible.” She explained:
Using paint and its inherent qualities–brilliance, transparency, opacity, liquidity, weight, warmth, and coolness–enables me to get my mind out of the way. These qualities guide me in a process of discovery which will determine the climate of the picture and define spatial relationships. While this approach results in certain kinds of places, I cannot name them but know instinctively when they appear.
Mason’s singular vision, often independent of the major art movements of the time, set her apart from her contemporaries. This along with her gender and a quieter lifestyle, may explain why she is not better known today.
Emily Mason in her Chelsea, New York, studio, 1991. Photograph by Tommy Naess. Image courtesy of The Brooklyn Rail.
Early Life and Education
Emily Mason was born in Greenwich Village, New York City, on January 12, 1932, to Warwood Edwin Mason, a sea captain for American Export Lines, and Alice Trumbull Mason. Mason’s mother was a writer, poet, and pioneering abstractionist herself, as well as a founder of the artist organization American Abstract Artists, a predecessor to the New York School and Abstract Expressionism. Through her mother and her mother’s artist friends such as Elaine de Kooning and Joseph Albers, Mason developed an early interest in art and Modernism.
After graduating from New York’s High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts), Mason studied fine art at Bennington College, a private liberal arts school in Bennington,Vermont, from 1950-1952. She transferred to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City to complete her degree in 1955. In 1956, Mason was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship for painting and spent two years in study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Italy. While in Italy, Mason was inspired by the country’s Byzantine-era architecture and began creating Color Field-style paintings. Upon returning home, her work garnered increasing recognition, taking off in the 1960s with her first solo exhibition at New York City’s Area Gallery in 1960.
Family
Prior to her move to Italy in 1956, Mason met the German-born American Realist/Color Field painter Wolf Khan (1927-2020). He joined her in Italy and on March 2,1957, they married in Venice. When Mason earned a second year of the Fulbright grant, it enabled the newlyweds to divide their time between Venice and Rome. The couple returned to New York in late 1958 where Mason gave birth to their daughter Cecily in 1959. In 1963, the family returned to Italy where their younger daughter Melany was born in 1964. Cecily later became an abstract artist in her own right and is a member of American Abstract Artists while her sister Melany is a social worker and children’s book author. Emily Mason and Wolf Khan were married for 62 years until her death in 2019.
Emily Mason working in her Chelsea studio in front of her painting Up River, 2016. Photograph by Steven Rose. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Artistic Practice
For much of her working life, Mason split her time between a studio in a converted loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan that she purchased in 1979 and an old blacksmith’s lodge on a farm in Wisconsin that she and her husband acquired in 1968. In a 2018 interview with Western Art & Architecture magazine, Mason explained the value of the two locations, saying that: "It is important to balance city life with experiencing nature. Winter in the city is the time for the fermentation of ideas. Summer is my time to carry them out.”
Emily Mason in her Brattleboro, Vermont, studio, 2018. Photograph by Joshua Farr. Image courtesy of Art Loves Company.
Mason’s work has been categorized as Lyrical Abstraction, or art that expresses the artist’s emotions by conveying a sense of the spiritual outlook an artist chooses to infuse into their paintings through a desire to communicate concepts, thoughts, ideas, and emotions abstractly. Her paintings are also characterized by the use of “analogous” color theory, groups of three colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel with similarities composed of one dominant color, such as yellow-orange, yellow, and yellow-green, or red-orange, red, and red-violet. She often incorporated elements of Color Field painting as well with broad areas of paint on her canvases. Her painting technique was described as starting with empty pet food cans into which:
[S]he mixed pigments and solvents to specific and varied consistencies, then poured them directly onto the canvas in a curious interplay with her painting’s other “pours.” Crucial to the overall process was the time (or sometimes, the lack thereof) elapsed between these poured layers. Often, Mason would gesturally spread out the poured paint layer with a paintbrush (the one she had used to mix that tin), or apply other physical treatments such as scraping, sanding, finger painting, or contact with an unconventional tool such as an old t-shirt.
The following several paintings serve as an introduction to Mason’s work.
Lignite (1968)
Emily Mason (1932-2019), Lignite, 1968. Oil on canvas, 50 x 41 in. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of 1stDibs.
Lignite (1968) takes its name from a soft combustible sedimentary rock called lignite formed from naturally compressed peat, often referred to as brown coal. Mason composed the painting she entitled Lignite primarily of the complementary hues of blue and yellow-orange. Where these pigments blend, a brownish tone emerges with additional hints of yellow and green. Violet appears on the right side of the canvas where layers of blue and red have also been applied and mingled. Faint wisps and horizontal streaks of blue mark the left section of the canvas as well, some made by the horizontal dripping of paint. The canvas emits an overall glow, so it certainly could be said to be titled in recognition of lignite burning.
Pleasure Garden (1970)
Emily Mason (1932-2019), Pleasure Garden, 1970. Oil on canvas, 52 x 44 in. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of Artsy.
Pleasure Garden (1970), one of Mason’s best-known works, consists of overlapping patches and blocks of color. Cheerful yellows dominate this happy composition while bright oranges, deep red, violet, blue, and green add to the mix. Red, yellow-green, and blue have all been dripped down the canvas, and the blue has been splashed as well as dripped, also contributing to a sense of movement are circular swatches of the same bright blue that look to be dropped onto complementary orange at the lower left.
Defiant of a Road (1972)
Emily Mason (1932-2019), Defiant of a Road, 1972. Oil on canvas, 52 ¼ x 40 ¼ in. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of Artsy
1972’s Defiant of a Road takes its name from a line in the “The Moon upon her Fluent Route” (1852), a poem by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) who happened to be both Mason’s namesake and favorite poet. Against the background of an aqua wash, Mason has poured, mixed, and splashed bluish-purple, lavender, pink, and buff, on top of which are strokes of blue, orange, pale yellow, and bright green. Whether or not evoking the moon, stars, and dawn as does Dickinson’s poem, the painting does aptly reflect the words “defiant of a road.” It is an exercise in the aesthetic properties of color and the validity of abstraction.
A Paper of Pins (1974)
Emily Mason (1932-2019), A Paper of Pins, 1974. Oil on canvas, 52 1/4 x 44 1/4 in. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of Artsy.
A Paper of Pins (1974) consists of irregularly-edged square and rectangular swatches of color juxtaposed against a dreamy background wash of soft green, pale yellow, and light blue. Water markings on the canvas form translucent dark-edged bands that seem depictive, in one area approximating a large paper clip or safety pin. A similar outline extends down from the first, disappearing behind a purple square at the bottom right. The painting mysteriously borders on the representational.
The Thunder Hurried Slow (1978)
Emily Mason (1932-2019), The Thunder Hurried Slow, 1978. Oil on canvas, 54 x 54 in. Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of Artsy.
Another painting, The Thunder Hurried Slow (1978), also takes its name from a line in an Emily Dickinson poem. Here, it is from the poem “A Thunderstorm” (1864). Splotches of brilliant blue and purple, reminiscent of storm clouds, hover toward the center of the picture while drips of paint fall like rain. A sheer veil of white mixed with soft yellow and pink crosses the bluish-purple patch like fog or wind. Accents of red are strewn about while elsewhere magenta, yellow, and green border the ”storm.”
Death and Last Exhibitions
At the age of 87, Emily Mason died of cancer at her home in Vermont on December 10, 2019, coincidentally the birth date of her namesake Emily Dickinson. She left behind her two daughters, four grandchildren, and her husband who survived her by only a few months. Mason enjoyed a final exhibition in the year of her death from January 3 to February 2, 2019 at the Miles McEnery Gallery (MMG) in New York City. Two years later, in 2021, the MMG (which represents Mason’s estate) mounted the first posthumous retrospective featuring twenty-two paintings made between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s in an exhibition entitled Emily Mason: Chelsea Paintings. Her work again recently featured at the gallery from December 14, 2023, to February 3, 2024, in a show focusing on earlier pieces, and taking its name from one of her paintings, called The Thunder Hurried Slow: Emily Mason Paintings, 1968-1979.
Emily Mason with some of her prints and paintings in her Chelsea studio in 2015. Photograph by Gavin Ashworth. Image courtesy of Elle Decor.
Legacy
Today, Emily Mason is considered among the finest American abstract painters. She is admired for the “exquisite sensitivity to color, balance, and form” with which she imbued her compositions. She approached each of her paintings on its own terms, comparing her process to a game of chess or a musical composition. As she described it, “One more move, like chess—a musical conversation—violin, cello. Pick it up, make a move—wait—let time go in between. Then I know what to do.” Both the urban and natural environments of New York and Vermont, respectively, shaped her body of work, as did the plane of the canvas and the physicality and colors of the paint. Her work resides in private collections, the Rutgers Archive in New Jersey, LewAllen Galleries in New Mexico, and the National Academy Museum in New York among others. In addition to making art, Mason was a devoted educator. For thirty years she taught painting at the City University of New York (CUNY) Hunter College.
Mason’s daughters Cecily and Melany Kahn serve on the board of the Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation that Emily Mason established in 2018 as the Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation to support the legacy of her mother and to advance opportunities to traditionally under-represented artists. After her death, the foundation was renamed the Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation to honor both women.
Emily Mason in her New York City studio, 1991. Photograph by Tommy Naess. Image courtesy of the Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation.