Shirley Jaffe

After studying art in the United States, Jaffe moved to Paris in 1949, eventually settling there permanently. In the early 1950s she embraced a form of gestural abstraction indebted to Abstract Expressionism, with a particular attention to light and color. After a stay in West Berlin in the early 1960s, where she met avant-garde composers Elliot Carter and Janis Xenakis, she introduced a greater sense of structure in her compositions. By the end of the 1960s, she had adopted the geometric style that would remain the hallmark of her art. The present gouache reveals geometric shapes appearing among the loose brushwork, signaling the shift that would mark her work during the following decade.