Emily Mason

This focus is featured in Almine Rech Magazine #39

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Born in 1932 and named after the poet Emily Dickinson, Mason came from a family of artists. Her mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, was a painter and a poet, one of the founders of the American Abstract Artists group. Both Alice’s mother and her sister, Margaret Jennings, were artists as well. Their ancestor was John Trumbull, a history painter renowned for his depictions of the American Revolutionary War. Between her family and her namesake, Mason grew up surrounded by art—especially art made by women.

From a young age Mason was exposed to the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Just by sitting in her mother’s studio, she mastered more practical and theoretical skills than many learn in art school. Trumbull Mason’s geometric abstractions were intricately composed, emphasizing space and form. She was at the very center of the New York scene and a fervent advocate for abstract art. Mason met many of the great creative minds of her time at her mother’s studio or at concerts and openings. It’s no wonder she quickly decided to become an artist herself, enrolling in the High School of Music & Art.

In 1950 Mason graduated from high school and left home for Bennington College, where she would study for two years. This period introduced the young artist to the world beyond New York, giving her some distance from her mother’s circle. Her years at Bennington also marked the beginning of Mason’s enduring connection to Vermont. But she ultimately found the college isolating, missing New York’s fast-paced creative scene. She went on to finish her studies at the Cooper Union.

In 1952 Mason spent a transformative summer at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Montville/Liberty, Maine. The program opened her eyes to the intersection of painting with craft practices like weaving, ceramics, and design. Mason never forgot a class taught by the designer Jack Lenor Larsen, in which he hung skeins of dyed wool side-by-side, demonstrating how each color affected those around it.² This lesson in analogous color theory stuck with the artist for the rest of her life, shaping her work. The importance of craft influenced Mason as well, and she incorporated principles of weaving into her idiosyncratic paintings and prints, most notably through her technique of applying multiple thin layers of pigment to a canvas.

Mason went to Europe for the first time in 1954, completing a grand tour that served as a comprehensive course in Western art history. A Fulbright grant brought her back to Italy in 1956; she studied in Perugia before enrolling at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice.³ Her work became imbued with lessons learned from the Italian masters, especially Piero della Francesca and Giotto. Before leaving for Italy, Mason had met the painter Wolf Kahn. The artists married in Venice in 1957. After extensive European travels, they returned to New York, where their first child was born. In 1964 Mason and Kahn went back to Italy, living in Rome for a year, where they welcomed a second child. In 1965 the young family moved definitively back to New York. Italy, and especially Venice, remained a creative lodestar for Mason.

In 1968 Mason and Kahn bought a farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont. It was here that the artists would spend the warmer months, developing a rhythm that greatly nourished their work: summers in Vermont and winters in New York.⁴ Mason set up her studio in a combined blacksmith’s shop and chicken coop, working with the doors and windows open, in perfect harmony with the natural world.

Mason was a dedicated gardener, both in Vermont and New York.⁵ The qualities that make a successful gardener are what made Mason an extraordinary painter: patience, observation, and a deep respect for materials. She would never put pressure on her works, only titling them once they were finished, often with a line from an Emily Dickinson poem. She let things grow.

As her career progressed, Mason’s art continued to be confident and ambitious. She showed in New York, across America, and internationally. In addition to her paintings, Mason produced an impressive body of work on paper, in which her signature technique of layered veils of color is especially remarkable. She was at her most experimental in these prints and oils on paper, developing ideas that would later inform her canvases. Mason was also a fierce advocate for other artists, first and foremost her mother, who died in 1971. She became a dedicated teacher and mentor for young artists, serving as a professor at CUNY Hunter College for over three decades.

Mason’s practice is a celebration of absolute freedom, led by intuition and, above all, the act of looking. The artist said that in viewing a painting “you recreate the painting experience itself.”⁶ Contemplating Mason’s work, we can feel the same freedom she achieved creating it, perhaps best described by Emily Dickinson:

A slash of Blue—
A sweep of Gray—
Some scarlet patches on the way,
Compose an Evening Sky—
A little purple—slipped between—
Some Ruby Trousers hurried on—
A Wave of Gold—
 A Bank of Day—
This just makes out the Morning Sky.⁷ 

Mason died in 2019, on December 10th, Dickinson’s birthday.

¹ Barbara Stehle, “The Light That Lives Within Colors” in Emily Mason: Unknown to Possibility (Rizzoli, 2025), 28.
² Emily Mason, first-person chronology, 2003, 5, Emily Mason Papers, Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, New York.
³ Stehle, “The Light That Lives Within Colors,” 24.
⁴ Emily Mason chronology, 14.
⁵ Stehle, “The Light That Lives Within Colors,” 41.
⁶ Mason, in Emily Mason: A Painting Experience, directed by Rafael Salazar Moreno (RAVA Films, 2022).
⁷ Emily Dickinson, “A Slash of Blue,” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 204.