American, 1932-2019

Emily Mason was an American painter known for her abstract works that explored, with exquisite sensitivity, the balance between color, balance, and form. Mason was born in 1932 in Manhattan and grew up surrounded by artistic influences. Mason’s mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, was an abstract painter herself and a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. She is also a descendant of the Revolutionary-era painter John Trumbull. Mason attended Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art before studying at Bennington College in Vermont. Mason would eventually graduate from Cooper Union in New York in 1955 and was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1956 to study painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice for two years. Afterwards, she remained in Italy and opened her own studio. While living in Venice, Mason met and married artist Wolf Kahn.

Mason returned to the US soon after marrying Kahn in 1957 and had her first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Area Gallery in Manhattan. In 1979 she was awarded the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize by the National Academy. Mason continuously explored and developed her distinctive lyrical abstractive style, all the while teaching painting at Hunter College for over 50 years.

Mason’s work was often exhibited at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, where she was an honorary trustee. Mason would spend her winters in a studio in Manhattan, and the warmer months in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she and Kahn also had a home. Her works are found in public, private, and corporate collections across the country, including The National Academy Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Morgan Stanley, and The Rockefeller Group.

Mason was named for Emily Dickinson, who’s prose she would sometimes use in her paintings’ titles. Mason, 87, died on Dickinson’s birthday, December 10.