Shirley Jaffe (artist)
| Shirley Jaffe | |
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Jaffe in 1998
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| Born |
October 2, 1923 Elizabeth, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | September 29, 2016 (aged 92) Louveciennes, France |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for |
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Shirley Jaffe (née Sternstein, October 2, 1923 – September 29, 2016) was an American abstract painter. Her early work is of the gestural abstract expressionist style, however in the late 1960s she changed to a more geometric style. This change was initially received with caution by the art world, but later in her career she was praised for the "idiosyncratic" and individual nature of her work. She spent most of her life living and working in France.
Jaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Benjamin and Anna (née Levine) Sternstein. Her father ran a shirt factory; however he died when Jaffe was 10. Her mother moved the family to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Jaffe attended Abraham Lincoln High School. She then studied fine art at Cooper Union in New York City, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1945.
After completing her degree, Jaffe worked initially in the print department of the New York Public Library and also worked for the department store Macy's drawing fashion sketches for the advertising department.
After her marriage, she lived in Washington D.C. for a period of time, attending the Phillips Art School there, then moved to Paris when her husband was transferred there in 1949. She became part of a circle of ex-pat American artists which included Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell.[5] Francis introduced Jaffe to his dealer, Jean Fournier, who became interested in Jaffe's work and began showing her art in his gallery.
Jaffe began as an abstract expressionist, using gesture in her painting in a similar way to Joan Mitchell. In 1968, however, a grant from the Ford Foundation funded her to spend a year in Berlin. This study break took her away from the circle of artist friends she had developed in Paris and exposed her to new influences such as the music of contemporary composers Iannis Xenakis and . It may also have reunited her thinking with the European abstraction of Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Wassily Kandinsky and Auguste Herbin. "It [my style of painting] changed when I went to Berlin," Jaffe said later. "I had a feeling that my paintings were being read as landscapes, which was not my intention. I felt I had to clear out the woods."
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