Editor’s Be aware: The next textual content has been excerpted with permission and tailored from Emily Mason: Unknown to Chance, edited by Elisa Wouk Almino, revealed by Rizzoli Electa on September 16, and obtainable on-line and in bookstores.
Emily Mason was at all times reluctant to simply accept a label for her artwork. In 1972, when requested which motion she belonged to, Mason firmly mentioned, “I really resent that but if somebody said, ‘What kind of painter are you?’ I guess I’d say Abstract Expressionist.” Requested the identical query in 2005, Mason supplied a nuanced reply: “[I] probably was a product of Abstract Expressionism,” to which she rapidly added, “of course John Cage says: ‘Get your mind out of the way.’”
Cage had reached New York in 1942. He received concerned with the New York Faculty a decade later. His actions at The Membership, the headquarters of the Summary Expressionists, came about throughout Mason’s adolescence. The composer was a household icon; Alice Trumbull Mason had launched her daughter to his work when she was nonetheless a baby, and later as a young person, after they went to The Membership. There, she rubbed shoulders with all of the Summary Expressionists who would come to Friday evening conferences. Elaine and Willem de Kooning had been mates with Trumbull Mason. It was a small group; everyone was in contact and touring by way of the identical areas.
Willem de Kooning was one of many uncontested leaders of the New York Faculty. He was one of the influential artists of the twentieth century, and so was John Cage, the godfather of course of artwork, conceptual artwork, and Fluxus, who impressed an entire era to rethink artwork. Nevertheless amazingly influential each artists had been, it is vitally uncommon to say each de Kooning and Cage as mentors to 1’s apply. Mason is that uncommon painter, which is why she took American artwork in an sudden route.
Mason in her studio in Brattleboro, Vermont, c. Nineteen Seventies (© 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Basis/ARS; photograph by Nancy Ellison)
Mason belonged to a era that stepped away from the easel and its verticality — painterly methods initially developed by Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler. It liberated the method; painters now moved across the work freely, even set foot on it. Pollock’s “action painting” and Frankenthaler’s “soak and stain” method led the best way. After them, artists explored the probabilities of portray on the ground, flat or on an incline, or on a tabletop.
Mason would begin flat and find yourself on the wall. She would pour paint and tilt the floor to direct its stream. The actions may acquire pace or be slowed down. A dialogue backwards and forwards with the portray would start. When you can see the affect of Summary Expressionist methods in Mason’s work, she had not one of the hubris of the male protagonists she noticed as giants on the scene. Her quest for coloration expression and construction was extra in tune with the sensitivity and unimposing sincerity of a Mark Rothko. For each of them, portray was not about an expertise, it was an expertise.
Of all of the painters of the New York Faculty, Mason admired de Kooning probably the most; she by no means missed his reveals. De Kooning had a mastery of oil portray and its actions that everyone envied. He additionally shared a love for Italy, the outdated masters, and its panorama. De Kooning admired the sensuality and atmospheric local weather of Titian and Giorgione specifically, Mason the crisp gentle and hieratic fantastic thing about Piero della Francesca and Giotto. De Kooning famous about Italian Renaissance artists: “The paintings seemed to work from whatever angle one chose to look at them. The whole secret lay in freeing oneself from the force of gravity.”
Mason admired de Kooning’s non-literal strategy to artwork. She repeatedly identified that he described himself as a “glimpser,” and famous that it was one thing she typically felt about herself: “I like it. I work indirectly, I am not confronting anything, but just sort of letting it come out.” Reminiscences, impressions, and emotions inform artwork however in a meandering method. One in every of Mason’s favourite Emily Dickinson poems was “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” — glimpsing not directly was for her the best way to be.
Throughout her tumultuous marriage with de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning had stayed unbiased in her stylistic growth. She had a pointy eye and was top-of-the-line artwork critics of her time. After Mason married Kahn in 1957, Elaine continued to be a well-recognized customer. She was very supportive of each their practices, and so they had been of hers as properly. They’d alternate works; Wolf and Elaine would pose for one another.
Within the late Nineteen Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies, Elaine sometimes babysat Mason’s daughters Cecily and Melany. Cecily remembers the painter’s robust and enjoyable persona: With a bottle of scotch obtainable for the evening, she would fortunately strive her poker and gin rummy methods on the ladies. At a time of feminist rebellion, she gave them sound recommendation: “Always be dressed to do somersaults, forward and backwards.” Like many ladies artists of the time, de Kooning selected to focus on her artwork. She by no means had youngsters of her personal, however she was the godmother to Ibram Lassaw’s daughter and a presence for Mason’s youngsters.
Emily Mason, “Marrow of the Day” (2005), oil on canvas (© 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Basis/ARS)
Within the days of eighth and ninth Streets exercise, when few ladies had been getting reveals at necessary galleries, Joan Mitchell was a notable exception — she confirmed greater than most. Round 1953–54, Mason noticed Mitchell’s work and thought: “Oh this is too Expressionist for me.” She spoke with Lassaw about it, whom she stories pointing to her: “[If] you feel uncomfortable about it maybe there is something there that you should look at more.” Lassaw had been romantically concerned with Alice Trumbull Mason from 1936 to 1941, and so they had remained superb mates after Mason’s father got here again to dwell with the household. His phrases mattered to Mason, and she or he adopted his recommendation.
Mason and Kahn visited Mitchell in Paris throughout the summer time of 1958. Mason was shaken up by what she noticed. “I was appalled at first,” she recounted to Robert Wolterstorff, “but I thought, ‘there’s more here that I am not letting in.’” Mitchell’s athletic marks and pictorial structure made an impression on Mason. A few of that vitality comes by way of in Mason’s “Wet Paint Spring” (1963), her calligraphic entanglement over skinny inexperienced washes evoking a number of the traits of Mitchell’s work of the interval, akin to “Garden Party” (c. 1962).
After her European journeys, Mason got here again to settle in New York in 1965. Inside a 12 months, she had produced outstanding works. The luminous “Equal Paradise” and “Stillness is Volcanic,” each from 1966, mark the start of her important contributions to the New York Faculty. Mason was already exhibiting her uncanny capability to specific gentle and create extremely sensual surfaces that had been to push artwork past Summary Expressionism. The textural presence of those two work comes near the sophistication of lacquer in its coloration contrasts and reflectivity, and calls to thoughts the work of Zao Wou-Ki, the Parisian Chinese language Artwork Informel painter. Mason’s surfaces already comprise an Japanese sensitivity, which, over time, would turn out to be progressively extra perceptible.
As early because the Fifties and as late because the Nineteen Seventies, the Beat era and the hippies embraced East and South Asian philosophy. To numerous levels, most of the youth within the inventive group practiced meditation and discovered from Buddhism. Whereas Mason was by no means a Buddhist herself, she meditated and took in a number of the rules of Zen. Her journey with Japanese philosophy doubtless started with John Cage at The Membership.
One late evening in 1949, a number of artists gathered across the kitchen desk of Ibram Lassaw’s loft and determined they’d discover a house to name their very own. That house turned 39 East eighth Avenue, the headquarters of the New York Faculty referred to as The Membership. It gave them a non-public house to get collectively, to social gathering and speak, meet outdated and new mates. From 1949 on, the loft would play a vital function for a large group of artists, and never least for Mason, as she met Wolf Kahn at The Membership in 1956.
Emily Mason, “Stillness is Volcanic” (1966), oil on canvas (© 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Basis/ARS)
Fridays at The Membership had been a time for lectures. Cage had lengthy been pissed off with the Western strategy to artwork and turned towards Japanese philosophy and its idea of vacuity. Underneath the affect of Buddhism, Cage had come to the daring place of letting go of intentions throughout the act of creation. The composer was most within the philosophy of the Japanese Zen Grasp D. T. Suzuki. In her examine of Cage and Zen Buddhism, Kay Larson notes: “Cage had allies at The Club. One of them was Ibram Lassaw . . . Lassaw’s favorite religion was Zen.” When Suzuki got here in 1952 to lecture at Columbia College, Cage and Lassaw attended collectively. Lassaw’s curiosity in Buddhism had developed within the early Thirties. The younger Mason would have been round Lassaw then, and once more within the early Fifties.
Artwork historian Valerie Hellstein writes: “During The Club’s earliest years, from 1949 to 1955, artists discussed Zen more than any other single topic; on at least ten separate evenings, they explored Zen and its relation to music, art, and psychology.” Based on Larson’s analysis, throughout that point, Cage lectured six instances at The Membership. Sadly, no data had been stored of attendees. It’s potential that Mason was within the viewers for some. What is for certain is that she was deeply receptive to Cage’s instructing. She would quote him till the top of her life.
Cage’s tackle Zen Buddhism and creativity got here as a counterpoint to the self-involved and emotional enter of the Summary Expressionists. “Art can be practiced in one way or another,” Cage wrote, “so that it reinforces the ego in its likes and dislikes, or so that it opens the mind to the world outside, and outside inside.”
Mason, like Cage, cultivated the artwork of letting go. In 1975, in discussing her inventive course of with Lona Foote, Mason mentioned: “I like to feel that I work on a painting until something magical happens. Until it becomes something outside of myself, a new vision . . . You lose a kind of control, but you gain something else.” In her greatest items, nothing comes between her and her canvas. The work seems akin to a pure phenomenon, activated by forces which can be past the artist. That is how Mason perceived it herself: “I feel as if I’m a conduit, but of what I don’t know until the paintings are finished.” She initiated and adopted. She would say, “Not knowing is my mantra.”
