In the first US exhibition since the passing of Shirley Jaffe (NA 2012), Cut in Square offers viewers a glimpse of the late American painter’s legacy. The New Jersey-born artist moved to Paris in 1949 and lived there until her death in 2016. “There is a reckoning that people do after an artist has passed,” said Elisabeth Ivers, Director of Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, where nine of Jaffe’s works from the last 40 years were displayed.
The earliest on view dates back to the mid-1980s, a period that marked a turning point in Jaffe’s trajectory as a painter. Although previously known as an Abstract Expressionist, she began favoring a more geometric approach in the late 1960s, before eventually arriving at her signature, hard-edge style. With visual comparisons to Henri Matisse’s paper collages, the exhibition’s titular piece, Cut in Square, 1986, exemplifies Jaffe’s characteristic use of bold colors and defined forms floating on a white background. This focus on color and form drove her practice, as evident in the untitled works on paper that are consistent with what she was producing in the 1990s.
A playful, if enigmatic, quality permeates Jaffe’s later paintings. “It was hard to crack her code,” remarked gallery owner Andrew Arnot, adding, “She didn’t give it up.” Such was her reluctance to have her work interpreted literally that she attributed her shift to geometry as a reaction to her gestural paintings being frequently misread as landscapes. Perhaps it was with a touch of irony and whimsy, then, that Jaffe chose to title a work filled with triangular shapes and calligraphic squiggles The Chinese Mountain, 2004 – 2005. Peaks and valleys recur as a discernible motif. On the other hand, the smaller painting Birds, 2009—featuring layered rectangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids—reveals no animal-like silhouettes. Curved and jagged lines, however, suggest movement, possibly flight.
Whether Jaffe drew inspiration from the world around her or from someplace deeply interior, her imagination showed no signs of slowing down, even at 92 years of age. In Splitting Yellow, 2016, one of the two works from the year she died included in the exhibition, organic shapes emerge. A bright, marigold swath cuts horizontally across. Veiny brown lines mirror tree branches or a fallen twig. Here, the forms appear more dominant, as the white space retreats— echoing her work from the 1970s in which colors and patterns fill the canvas. Potentially, she was headed somewhere unseen.
As a mini 40-year survey, Shirley Jaffe Cut in Square represents only a small sample of an artistic career that lasted over seven decades. What remains clear throughout is a strong sense of self and individuality. “She cultivated this fanbase, especially with younger women painters who not only admired her work, but also admired her stick-to-itiveness over the years,” according to Arnot. He cited the likes of Amy Feldman, Patricia Treib, Amy Sillman (NA 2010), and Charline von Heyl as being particularly influenced by Jaffe. Plans for a more extensive retrospective are already in talks, hopefully ensuring that new generations of artists and the public will continue to discover her work.
Shirley Jaffe Cut in Square is presented at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City January 17 – February 16, 2020.
Mimi Wong writes about art and culture. She also serves as Editor in Chief of the literary magazine The Offing and New York desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific. She is a recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation | Creative Capital Art Writers Grant. Born and raised in California’s Silicon Valley, she graduated from New York University, and now lives in Brooklyn.
