Emily Mason, Emily Mason The Fifth Element (Hand signed and inscribed by Emily Mason), 2009

Emily Mason

Emily Mason The Fifth Element (Hand signed and inscribed by Emily Mason), 2009

Hardback monograph with dust jacket (Hand signed, dated and inscribed by Emily Mason)

Hand signed in marker directly underneath the title; inscribed to Kevin and dated 2013 top right by Emily Mason

10 1/2 × 9 × 1 inches

Unframed

Provenance
Signed for the present owner at the artist's opening at the David Findlay Gallery in New York City

This lavishly illustrated hardback monograph with dust jacket was signed and inscribed to Kevin - the present owner - in 2013 at the artist's opening at the David Findlay Gallery in New York City.
Makes a superb gift!

Book information:
Publisher: Mason, November 10, 2009
English; hardcover; 128 pgs with color illustrations

Publisher's blurb:
Emily Mason: The Fifth Element is the first comprehensive presentation of Emily Mason's work and brings long-overdue attention to this contemporary American artist. This volume includes eighty reproductions of the artist's oil paintings, along with a selection of prints, highlighting many of the most significant works from each phase of her impressive career. David Ebony's text brings Mason's life and work into focus, showing how her unique painterly vocabulary has proven that the expressive possibilities of abstract art are indeed boundless.

More about Emily Mason:
EMILY MASON was born in New York City in 1932. She graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art and studied at Bennington College for two years before attending and graduating from the Cooper Union. She spent 1956-58 in Italy on a Fulbright grant for painting, where she studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice.

During Mason’s two-year stay in Italy she married the painter Wolf Kahn, whom she had met earlier in New York. Mason and Kahn’s daughter, Cecily Kahn, is also an abstract painter, as was Emily Mason’s mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in New York.

Mason spent more than six decades exploring her distinctive vein of lyrical, luminous abstraction. Her paintings executed in oil are distinguished by a sense of intriguing intimacy combined with uncompromising, though gentle, intensity. They evince a sense of structure within open, luminous space and juxtapose robust color harmonies with vivid contrasts that create an engaging optical vibration. Robert Berlind said of her in Art in America, “Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado.”

Mason exhibited steadily throughout her career since she emerged on the Tenth Street gallery scene with multiple exhibitions at the Area Gallery in New York City in the 1960s. In 1979, she was awarded the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize by the National Academy. She taught painting at Hunter College for more than thirty years. Her work has been included in numerous public and private collections.

Emily Mason: The Fifth Element, a comprehensive treatment of her work by Art in America associate managing editor David Ebony, was published in 2006 by George Braziller publishers. A second monograph, Emily Mason: The Light in Spring, was published in 2015 by University Press of New England.

Emily Mason died in December of 2019 in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery