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The Arts Intel Report

Shirley Jaffe: An American Woman in Paris

Shirley Jaffe, Untitled, c. 1980.

Apr 20 – Aug 29, 2022
Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France

The American artist Shirley Jaffe graduated from New York’s Cooper Union in 1945, but life soon took her to Paris. When she arrived, Parisian artists judged her to be a major abstract painter. Jaffe sublet Louise Bourgeois’s studio, which was in the same street as Joan Mitchell’s place. In the 1960s, however, a trip to Berlin made Jaffe realize that Abstract Expressionism had began to bore her. She pivoted toward geometry. “It changed when I went to Berlin,” Jaffe said. “I had a feeling my paintings were being read as landscapes which was not my intention. I had to clear out the woods.” Jaffe died in 2016, at age 92. Six years after her death, this exhibition presents her career chronologically. —Elena Clavarino

Photo: Bertrand Huet/Tutti Image/Courtesy of the Estate of Shirley Jaffe, Galerie Nathalie Obadia,Paris/Bruxelles © Adagp, Paris, 2022