Alice Trumbull Mason

(Hardback)

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A groundbreaking artist, Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971) was one of the earliest painters of the twentieth century to embrace abstract painting in America. Mason's early paintings have been compared to those of Gorky, Kandinsky, and Miro, and in 1936 she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and one of its leaders in the promotion of abstract work by artists such as Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, and many others. Mason was a true artist's artist whose efforts helped lead to the great movements of later twentieth-century art, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Post-Modernism, and Conceptual Art. Alice Trumbull Mason features essays that illuminate and contextualize the artist's multifaceted work and personal life through her paintings, prints, poetry, and letters. The book reveals the full life story of a seminal abstractionist, making a sound argument for adding her to the annals of great twentieth-century artists.

Reviews

"This new monograph of [Alice Trumbull Masons] life and work is an excellent addition to recent scholarship that has centered women artists who previously occupied the margins of the artistic canon." WOMEN'S ART JOURNAL


"The first monograph of a painters painter brings a jolt of new insight and a confident show of her works mindfulness and beauty. Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction is, astoundingly, the first monograph on Mason nearly a half-century after her death. Its 160 full-page color reproductions represent about three-fourths of her work. . . . The book fulfills a longtime goal of the artists daughter, Emily Mason, a New York abstract painter who worked closely with Rizzoli on it butdied in December before its completion. Its numerous reproductions suggest a pent-up frustration, a determination to make up for lost time. The daughter clearly intended to eliminate doubt about her mothers achievement, and to pay tribute, she wrote, to the perseverance of her inner core. Mission accomplished. With essays on the artists paintings, prints, poetry and letters, this volume gives the fullest chronology yet of Masons life and work, and reveals tantalizing possibilities for future research. . . . Masons work is not something you absorb in a flash. Its integrity, mindfulness and assured beauty emerge slowly, in careful compositions, color choices, delicate but tactile brushwork, and inevitable balance." NEW YORK TIMES

Author Bio

Elisa Wouk Almino is senior editor of Hyperallergic. Marilyn Brown is professor emerita of art history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Tulane University. Meghan Forbes is a postdoctoral fellow in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Will Heinrich writes about art for The New Yorker and the New York Times. Thomas Micchelli is an artist, writer, and coeditor of Hyperallergic Weekend. Christina Weyl is an art historian and curator with a focus on midcentury American printmaking and women artists.