Shirley Jaffe

Exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 20 April - 29 August 2022

An heir to Kandinsky and Matisse, the American artist Shirley Jaffe (1923-2016), who moved to Paris in 1949, was initially a member of the Abstract Expressionist movement and her early paintings were full of gestural energy. From the 1970s onwards, she abandoned gesture and matter for colours circumscribed by a free geometry. The composition became more frontal and the idea of chaos became a metaphor and a driving force to create solid blocks of disjointed colours planed by an increasingly insinuating white "cement".

This book, which is both a monograph and an exhibition catalogue, presents the life of Shirley Jaffe as well as her works with their well-ordered, but skilfully countered geometry, apparently random, but scrupulously dictated.