TitleFor a Moment
Artist
Emily Mason
(1932 - 2019)
Date1996
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 24 × 24 in.
Framed: 25 3/8 × 25 1/4 × 1 7/8 in.
SignedSigned at bottom center: "Emily Mason 1996".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, February 16, 2000
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number2000.4
Label TextThroughout her nearly fifty-year career, Emily Mason has explored the infinite possibilities of abstract painting through color and gesture. The daughter of Alice Trumbull Mason, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, Mason grew up in New York City during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. As a child in this environment she wondered not whether she would be a painter, but instead what type of painter she would be. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art she attended Bennington College briefly before returning to New York to continue her studies at The Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art. Mason's color sense was shaped, in part, during a residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, where the lectures by Jack Lenor Larsen on color had a profound influence on her. Color has remained as her true métier.In 1956 Mason won a Fulbright grant and traveled to Venice to paint. Prior to her departure, she had met another young painter, Wolf Kahn, NA, who would soon join her in Italy, and in 1957 the two were married. By the late 1960s Mason had moved away from the agitated gesture of her early work and was layering sweeping chromatic strokes over broad areas of color. She began teaching at Hunter College in 1979 and in an attempt to encourage her students to be free of the conscious mind used as part of her curriculum Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain. That same year Mason's painting, August Burning Low, was the first abstract work purchased through the Ranger Fund. The automatic technique, combined with her interest in color, was recognized by artist and critic Louis Finklestein, who identified it as an important strain of abstract painting. He wrote: "I call this direction 'color automatism,' and think it a vein of artistic production, which, while its roots are clear, remains insufficiently explored, and she is a good representative of some of its possibilities."
Layered works such as "For a Moment" recall at once the placid broad areas of Color Field painting as well as the frenetic energy and gesture of Abstract Expressionism, and her work has been described as a link between the New York School and later developments of abstract painting. The process of painting is essential to Mason, and, working intuitively, she often paints on the floor and from all sides of the canvas. "For a Moment" combines Mason's interest in gesture and color, and, as David Ebony has pointed out, evokes the Aristotelian notion of the fifth element. A complement to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, the fifth element is a mysterious metaphysical substance and one that Aristotle believed filled the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere. Mason's technique of layering gestural areas over those of broad color and the combinations of complementary colors in "For a Moment," in addition to the work's title, suggest meaning beyond the surface of the canvas.
