Born in 1925, the American Paris-based painter Shirley Jaffe has been producing flat, colorful abstract compositions that call to mind such artists as Stuart Davis, Jonathan Lasker and Hans Arp for more than 60 years. This volume collects works from the 1960s through the present.

This is a singularly compelling book about making and looking at painting in our time. Rubinstein, a well-known critic who has been a friend of the artist since youth, writes clearly and directly about Jaffe’s life and her works which are excellently reproduced in the generous plate section. He is up to the challenge presented by Jaffe who is almost as formidable and articulate in words as she is in painting. The combination of Rubinstein and Jaffe (texts and images) offers an unusual opportunity to attend to and think about painting.

An heir to Kandinsky and Matisse, Shirley Jaffe’s early work was in the abstract expressionist movement and her first paintings were full of gestural energy; the bright colours were worked in broad brush strokes. From the 1970s onwards, her work opened up a more personal path; she abandoned gesture and matter for colours that were circumscribed by a free geometry. The composition becomes more frontal and the idea of chaos becomes a metaphor and a driving force for solid blocks of colour disjointed and planed by an increasingly insinuating white “cement”. A hospitable woman, Jaffe has welcomed many young artists into her home, but she has always remained secretive about her personal life and laconic about her feminist convictions. A rich iconography of Shirley Jaffe’s works as well as unpublished archival photographs illustrate this monograph. The book includes texts by Frédéric Paul, curator of contemporary art at the Musée national d’art moderne, Svetlana Alpers, a renowned American art historian, Claudine Grammont, director of the Musée Matisse in Nice, and an interview with the artist conducted by Robert Kushner. Catalog of the exhibition “Shirley Jaffe. An American in Paris” at the Centre Pompidou from April 20 to August 29, 2022.