Alice Trumbull Mason
Alice Trumbull Mason
1904 - 1971
American painter. In her youth she travelled extensively in Europe, studying at the British Academy in Rome in 1923. She then trained with the painter Charles W. Hawthorne (1872–1930) at the National Academy of Design, New York, where she formed a friendship with artists Ilya Bolotowsky and Ephyr Slobodkina (b 1914), who were later co-founders of the Abstract American Artists group (AAA) in 1937. Mason continued her studies until 1931, attending courses at the Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, given by the Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky. In December 1930 she married and subsequently had two children. Before resuming painting (1934) she took up poetry and a literary correspondence with such leading artistic figures as Gertrude Stein. Stein’s belief in the self-generative power of non-representational language accorded with Mason’s own experiments in visual abstraction. Mason became a key figure in the AAA, acting as Treasurer and President between 1939 and 1963. During the 1940s and 1950s she exhibited occasionally at the Rose Fried Gallery, Twentieth Century Gallery and Hanse Gallery, New York. Her work created an important bridge for succeeding abstract and conceptual artists, laying its emphasis on structural elements of pure geometric form in closely organized and contemplative designs that typified Mason’s natural reserve and lyrical sensibility. ["Mason, Alice Trumbull." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T054942.]
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