September Book Bag: from Arthur Jafa’s searing chronicles of Black America to a volume of Goya’s prints.
Our round-up of the latest art publications.
Emily Mason: Unknown to Possibility, Elisa Wouk Almino (editor), Rizzoli Electa, 264pp, $75 (hb).
The first major monograph on Emily Mason (1932–2019), an underrated post–New York School abstract painter, includes newly commissioned essays and a roundtable conversation with Nari Ward, a former student of Mason’s. “Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado,” painter Robert Berlind wrote in Art in America (2003).
“I got to know Mason’s work more deeply while editing a 2020 monograph on her mother Alice Trumbull Mason, one of the first American abstractionists, now finally getting her due. Emily often recalled her mother’s wry prediction: ‘I’ll be famous when I’m dead.’ In recent years, a similar sense of posthumous recognition has begun to surround Emily herself,” says the book’s editor Elisa Wouk Almino.