Shirley Jaffe
Tibor de Nagy is pleased to announce Shirley Jaffe, The 1950s and 1960s, Works on Paper and a Painting. This exhibition presents a rarely exhibited body of work that is early and foundational in her long career as an innovative abstract painter.
Shirley Jaffe, born in New Jersey in 1923, grew up in Brooklyn and studied at Cooper Union. In 1949, as a young artist, she traveled to Paris where she then permanently settled until her death in 2016. She was part of a coterie of artists who were "Americans in Paris" after the war. This group included Sam Francis, Al Held, Janice Biala, Norman Bluhm, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell, and Kimber Smith. In the early 1960s Jaffe spent time in Berlin on a Ford Foundation Grant, this period was crucial in developing her painting style, the works in the exhibition reflect the level of sophistication she gained during this time. From the early 1960s onwards Jaffe exhibited extensively in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. In 1989 she had her first exhibition in New York at Artists Space and in the decades that followed her reputation in her home country has grown considerably. Tibor de Nagy Gallery has exhibited the work of Shirley Jaffe since 2002.
In April 2022 a Shirley Jaffe retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, curated by Frédéric Paul. This exhibition will travel to the Basel Art Museum and the Musée Matisse in 2023.
Jaffe’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Musée de la Ville de Paris and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Basel Art Museum among many others.
The exhibition will continue until January 21, 2023.
Inquiries to info@tibordenagy.com
Shirley Jaffe is an outlier in the history of Abstract Expressionism. A member of the so-called “second generation,” she was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1923, and grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. In 1948, she saw the Pierre Bonnard retrospective at MoMA, which influenced a number of artists of her generation, and in 1949 she moved to Paris with her then-husband, Irving Jaffe. In Paris, she became part of a scene of expatriate artists that included Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, Jack Youngerman, Ed Clark, and, later, Janice Biala, Kimber Smith, and Al Held. Unlike the other Americans in this group, Jaffe, who passed away in 2016, never returned to the United States.
Jaffe began exhibiting her work in Paris in 1956, but she did not have her first solo show in New York until 1989. For those who have followed her art, the work in Shirley Jaffe: The 1950s and 1960s, Works on Paper and a Painting at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (December 10, 2022–January 21, 2023) is largely unknown in New York. The show includes 15 undated pieces on paper, likely from 1958–60, and a vertical oil painting, “Dominos 2” (1962).