"Why isn't she more famous?"The question has bugged me since "Why I first saw the work of Emily Mason, one of the most ravishing post-New York School abstract painters, and my nominee for the most underrated. Not that these things are ever very fair; it's just bizarre that an artist who knew everyone, and whose family everyone knew, ended up so close to unknown.
Her distant ancestor John Trumbull painted a portrait of Alexander Hamilton that should look familiar to anyone who's handled a ten-dollar bill, and her mother, the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason, hung out with Jackson Pollock and Helen Franken-thaler. Many artists have deserved glory, but few of them had Elaine de Kooning for a babysitter. Where's nepotism when you need it? The simplest explanation is that Mason, who died in 2019, at the age of eighty-seven, was born a generation too late for stardom. By the time she'd come into her own-the early Reagan years, I would say-abstract painting's stock was sagging. To make matters worse, she shows every sign of having been the most embarrassing thing an American painter can be: sane. When deciding who belongs in the pantheon, we like a wild life at least as much as good art, and on this count, alas, Mason failed to delivernot a single affair with Clement Greenberg or drunken piss at a party. "One of the least angry people I've ever known," the critic David Ebony said, "and least bitter about things that had gone wrong for her in the art world." I'm not trying to be rude, but she and the artist Wolf Kahn, her husband of sixty-plus years, appear to have had a happy, stable marriage. The juiciest gossip I could find: at first, Mason's mother was surprised that she'd chosen to cohabit with a figurative painter.
Denne historien er fra January 29, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra January 29, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.