Through the window of Emily Mason’s Vermont studio, a late February snowfall has the highest albedo: pure white. A scientific measurement of the capacity of a substance to reflect sunlight, albedo is expressed in a value from 1 to 5. Before she layered them with color—poured, pooled, and swooshed—Mason’s blank canvases would come in at a solid 5. Ensuing washes and strokes, like the penumbral traceries of tree shadows in snow, were gradually applied, absorbing light and transmitting plumes of spectral color. This winter, at Almine Rech in Paris, Emily Mason: Other Rooms (Works from 1969-2017), is a six-decade survey of the artist’s prodigious oeuvre, five years after her passing. The first major monographic exhibition devoted to Mason in Europe, the exhibition provides a fuller assessment of her contribution to art history and her invention of experimental methods, resulting in works of stunning complexity, variety, and force. This essay is a meditation on Emily Mason’s art, inspired by the curatorial discoveries of the exhibition, with forays into the influence of plants and gardens on her thinking.
Mason eschewed the planning of a painting too far advance. She launched its action, and followed where the work took her. This was not a random process but one akin to the improvisational skills of dance or garden making. Refined over decades, her approach harnessed the dynamic advantages of unplanned occurrences coupled with technical mastery, extrapolated from a lifetime of studying and living with great works of art, from Duccio to DeKooning to Sheila Hicks. Utilizing gravity, she poured paint upon canvas from cat food tins containing mixtures of oil paint and distilled turpentine, tilting the painting to allow the liquid to run and coalesce, in a series of instinctive movements. This method echoed the “chance operations” of her friend, the composer and mycologist John Cage (1912-1992), who drew upon Buddhist philosophy in developing his working concepts. While the pouring of paint had been an breakthrough method of Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters, Mason extended the vocabulary by working on gessoed, rather than raw canvas, as well as using novel grounds such as Ampersand Claybord, and Patent Office Bristol Board, manufactured by the Eugene Dietzgen Company Dietzgen’s sales catalogs from the 1920s on note that: “This Bristol Board possesses the thickness, quality, tint and size required by the United States patent office. It can be rolled without injury and has a hard, white surface, that stands erasing perfectly.”
As gardeners dilute their fertilizers, Mason used her turpentine to stretch the living daylights out of every ounce of her paint, until the pigment particles were sometimes visible to the naked eye. In so doing her paints often resemble ceramic glazes and textile dyes—materials imprinted upon her during a transformational 1952 summer residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine where she studied color with the textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen. In addition, I believe that some of the starburst and soapy effects in her paintings may have been the result of pigment repulsions. Some metal-containing pigments that she used (Gamblin’s Cadmium Chartreuse and Holbein’s Baryte Green) contain ingredients with magnetic properties, furthering the visual effects Mason achieved.
Emily Mason was born in New York City in 1932. Her father, Warwood, was a ship captain for the American Export Lines. Alice Trumbull Mason, her mother, (a descendant of the painter John Trumbull) was a founding member of American Abstract Artists. Emily attended Bennington College and graduated from Cooper Union before receiving a fellowship in 1955 to study painting Venice, where in 1957 she married the painter, Wolf Kahn. Her daughters, Cecily and Emily, were were born in New York and Rome respectively. While she traveled internationally and extensively with her family, Mason’s sojourns in Venice became the most impactful experience to shape her life as a painter. For six decades, interspersed with travel, Mason and Kahn lived productive, contributive lives, deeply intertwined in the cultural life of New York City.
From childhood, Mason’s encounters with plants and the natural world was a wellspring of pleasure. In summer, Alice Trumbull Mason took Emily and and her brother to a farm in Bucks County Pennsylvania, where they played in the orchards and brooks. At Bennington, botany class was a favorite. Mason documented her research on plant propagation with botanically accurate hand illustrations in “notes on a nasturtium” (the title page typed in lower case, in fine Emily Dickinson style).
Later, in her studio in New York’s Flatiron District, where she worked in the winter months, plants were nurtured in a small cedar-framed greenhouse, handmade by the artist Elizabeth Tubergen. Part of the daily ritual was quiet plant-tending, using homemade fertilizer concoctions that Steven Rose, Mason’s studio assistant, remembers as turning quite malodorous over time. From June through October, painting and garden making were given full reign during Vermont summers. The plant pilgrimage began with transporting Mason’s prized begonias and orchids from New York to Vermont and back again.
In 1968, Mason and Kahn purchased a farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont overlooking the hills of New Hampshire and Mount Monadnack. Wolf’s studio is perched on a steep southeast-facing hill, lined with stately black locust trees. Emily transformed a chicken coop and blacksmith’s shop into her first summer studio. Working with local horticulturists, she cultivated extensive, perennial gardens while Wolf maintained vegetable beds, berries, and fruit trees. Climbing roses (fragranced only), poppies irises, delphinium, gladiolas, lavender, echinacea, daylilies, and marigolds and were followed in fall by asters, dahlias, and helenium. As in some of her paintings, Emily loved to intersperse deep blue, black and purple hues among brighter silvers and yellows. Rare tree peonies and lady slipper orchids heralded spring, and daffodils naturalized everywhere. The woodlands teem with ferns, mosses, and spring ephemerals.
The shaded path to Mason’s studio contained hellebores, wild ginger, and bottle gentian. Flowering in late summer into fall, Gentiana andrewsii has narrow, purplish leaves whorled or opposite below dark blue/purple bottle-like flowers that never fully open.
The gardens were not formally designed, but conformed to the terrain and the aspects of light. Everyone remembers how Emily and Wolf discussed the effects of light there. Brad Moloney, the gardener, eventually convinced Emily (who wasn’t really bothered by the encroachment of the lawn into the flower beds), to permit edging around them. Fancy plants from Brooklyn Botanical Garden sales were tried, against the advice of the gardener (inhospitable planting zone), but their eventual demise was taken in stride. Indoors, shelves are still lined with books on woodland ecology, mosses and mycology, a pursuit that Mason and John Cage mutually pursued.
Emerging in early spring in the woods surrounding Mason’s studio, ferns and tiny club mosses (lycophytes) are among the oldest plants on earth. In Mason’s Club Moss, 1997, the size of a greeting card, we are on the ground, viewing the emergent plant in silhouette against an ultramarine blue background. A scabby texture in hues of burgundy, ochre and blue green, emulates layers in the soil profile through which rhizomatous roots penetrate the ground.
Cézanne’s sun-drenched views of L’Estaque are not far from Mason’s Open to the Rain, 1982, where tilted planes in saturated, analogous tones of grey-violet, and cobalt blue lock together like fields under cultivation. In her use of blotting, wiping and using brushes to reinforce certain edges, Mason creates variations that mimic the haze of evaporation in a garden after rain.
In the scroll-like work, Untitled, 2010, a phosphorescent cloud of silver-white washes over a volume of earthy ochres and burnt sienas. In the upper right, two wide, curving strokes push against a swath of celestial blue, the color of Giotto’s ceiling in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. These frescoes were deeply influential for Mason when she saw them in the early 1950s. As the astronauts of Apollo 17 left Earth’s gravitational field, their view of home must have caused a speechless feeling of awe, as this artwork similarly generates.
In a photograph from the early 2000s, possibly taken in Maine, Emily and Wolf hang out with their longtime friend, the painter Lois Dodd, in a yard flanked by overgrown gardens. Between them, a floral textile hangs Out to Dry, 2006. Mason’s painting, on claybord, deftly captures the qualities of air fluttering through draped laundry. A stream of ultramarine blue divides the composition, evoking the process of water percolation through rocks and soil.
Art historian Barbara Stehle, in her revealing catalog essay, points out the impact of Joan Mitchell’s whirling dervish paint handling on Mason. In Wet Paint Spring, 1963 —a painting Mason made a few years after she and Wolf had visited Mitchell in Paris—a tangle of branchlike lines barely contains a morass of greens, pinks and and yellows. It was unusual for Mason, to use sharp lines, or pure black in her paintings.
While her artistic language never conformed to a calcified style, Mason privileged the unpredictable, along with giving things plenty of time to percolate. I believe that the intellectual muscle to work in this way was honed through her practice of cultivating gardens, in dialogue with her gardeners. While other artists of her generation celebrated the complex beauty of plants in their work (Harriet Shorr and Janet Fish for example), Mason’s experience with them was transmuted abstractly through her dispatch of unconventional techniques. Disinterested in depiction, Mason translated the visual phenomena of the chemical, chromatic, photic, and ecological atmospheres of plant life. Through the influence of gravity, and the metaphors of botany, Emily Mason has given us an abundant body of work that reflects her peripatetic travels, with perennial returns to familiar ground.