Shirley Jaffe. Avant et après Matisse

Shirley Jaffe (1923-2016) was a prominent figure in abstract painting from the turn of the 20th and 21st century. She studied in New York, then Washington, which she left for Paris, where she remained from 1949 onwards.

 

She expressed both an historical fact and her own contrarian nature by declaring that she had discovered Bonnard in New York and Pollock in Paris. Friends with North American artists Jules Olitski, Al Held, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Sam Francis, post-war expatriates like herself, she sublet Louise Bourgeois's studio and maintained a stimulating relationship with Joan Mitchell. In 1969, she moved to a flat at 8 rue Saint-Victor in Paris, where many artists visited her and where she painted until her last days.

 

This is the second time that the musée Matisse de Nice pays tribute to Shirley Jaffe's work, having invited her in 1994 to present her recent paintings. This new exhibition spans the whole of her career and traces her stylistic evolution marked by two radical breaks. It shows how, at the end of the 1960s, after Abstract Expressionist beginnings, she abandoned gestural painting in favour of compositions structured by geometric shapes in bright, contrasting colours and then how, from the 1980s onwards, she used the potential of white to bring out the tension between monochromatic motifs. Comparisons have always been drawn between the American's mature paintings and Matisse's last body of work, his paper cut-outs. Jaffe, for her part, didn't like to discuss the matter.  Yet it is now known that the 1961 exhibition devoted to Matisse's cut-outs at the musée des Arts décoratifs deeply influenced her.

 

Running throughout the museum tour route, this exhibition aims to uncover resonances between the two artists' work.

 

The exhibition is organised with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Kunstmuseum Basel. It was first presented in Paris from 20 April to 29 August 2022, then in Basel from 25 March to 30 July 2023.