Shirley Jaffe

Born in New Jersey in 1923, Shirley Jaffe studied at Cooper Union in New York, which she left for Paris, where she settled in 1949. On friendly terms with Jules Olitski, Norman Bluhm, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Sam Francis, she passed for a major painter of the new abstraction. Later associated with Kimber Smith, Jack Youngerman and Al Held, she sublet Louise Bourgeois's studio in the same street as Joan Mitchell. In 1969 she moved to the rue Saint-Victor in the 5th arrondissement – a studio she would never leave, continuing to paint there until her last breath. In the 1960s she turned her back on her promising beginnings in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. Not until the 1970s do we see the development of her personal style with chiselled contours which, while not allowing her to be assimilated with the then-declining Hard Edge wave, maintained her at an equal and respectful distance from her former Expressionist peers and the advocates of Concrete Art. Her geometry is nicely ordered but skilfully thwarted, always askew, apparently random but scrupulously dictated, like some of the musical compositions of her contemporaries.