Emily Mason in her studio, Chelsea, New York. Photography by Steven Rose, 2016 © 2025 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS.
“My work, while never a depiction of nature, is analogous in its process to the workings of nature and, in its result, aims for the beauty of the interior of a great storm or a day lily.”
Emily Mason quoted in E.W. Almino,"'That Magical Thing': The Poetry of Emily Mason," 2018.
Born in 1932 in New York City, Emily Mason held a distinct place in postwar American abstraction. Her radiant, color-saturated canvases fused the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the luminosity and lyricism of Color Field painting. Working in New York and Vermont over a career that spanned more than six decades, Mason developed a singular visual language—one that is deeply intuitive, process-driven, and rooted in a reverence for color as emotional force.
Born into a lineage of artists—her mother was the pioneering abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason—Emily Mason carved her own path. She attended Bennington College, graduated from Cooper Union, and earned early recognition with a Fulbright grant to study in Italy in 1956. While in Venice, she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti where she first learned about blotting and transferring paint onto canvas. While in Italy, she also absorbed the atmospheric qualities of Venetian light and the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance as well as the lively debates about contemporary Abstraction. These influences imbued her work with a distinctive sensitivity to color, transparency, and texture, hallmarks of hermature style.
In 1957, while still in Italy, she married fellow painter Wolf Kahn. In 1958, the couple moved back to New York City, which was still dominated by Abstract Expressionism. Mason charted her own course, favoring a more intuitive, layered, and meditative approach. Her technique—pouring, staining, and brushing thinned oil paint onto unprimed canvas—produced luminous surfaces in which color appears to float, merge, and dissolve. Though she was often associated with the Color Field painters, Mason resisted alignment with any specific movement, preferring to explore what she called “letting a painting talk to you.”
In 1960, she was awarded her first solo exhibition at Area Gallery in 1960. Over the ensuing decade Mason and Kahn would split time between New York, a farm in Vermont, and Italy. Mason said, “It is important to balance city life with experiencing nature. Winter in the city is the time for the fermentation of ideas. Summer is my time to carry them out.”
Emily Mason's work has been exhibited widely in galleries and institutions, including the National Academy Museum, New York, the Brattleboro Museum, Vermont, the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Harrison, New York, and have been written about and reviewed extensively in publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Artnet News, among many others. Her paintings are held in numerous public and private collections.