An eye in the city - painting, Shirley Jaffe, Musee Matisse, Nice, France

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Raphael Rubinstein

Shirley Jaffe has never shown much interest in photography before or since, but for a brief period around 1967 she spent time taking snapshots (with a cheap camera someone had given her) of everyday objects and street scenes. Wandering around Paris, Jaffe found herself drawn to half-demolished buildings on the Left Bank, in particular to the old Gare Montparnasse, then being torn down to make way for the first Parisian skyscraper, the Tour Montparnasse. The few surviving prints of Jaffe's black-and-white photos show confused scenes: massive chunks of masonry scattered around, with bent and broken shafts of wood and metal protruding from the rubble, pieces of stone or cement dangling in midair from twisted reinforcing rods. In some of the backgrounds one can make out wrecking machines and surviving fragments of the old railway station, for example, an archway whose surrounding walls have been destroyed.

In the late '60s, as she was taking these photographs, Jaffe's paintings were on the verge of a radical transition from gestural abstraction to hard-edge, grid-based geometry, very different from the destruction-in-progress of the photographs. In fact, rather than announcing that imminent shift, those scenes of chaotic Parisian demolition sites jump ahead to strikingly prefigure the complex compositional energy that has characterized Jaffe's work since the early '80s. Consciously or not, Jaffe's foray into the world of Parisian urban renewal was a quest for artistic models, only instead of an imposing, late-modern monolithic structure like the Tour Montparnasse, the broken-up architecture of Jaffe's later paintings turned out to be closer in spirit to a postmodern design like the Pompidou Center.

During a recent interview Jaffe brought up those '60s snapshots, acknowledging the importance of the urban environment to her work and also how its full effect was delayed. "In my paintings," she remembered, "I wanted to give a vision of the city as I saw it. That took a long time."(1) Jaffe's event-filled '80s and '90s paintings offer proof that she has indeed found a way of incorporating, and elaborating on, that early urban vision; they also reaffirm Jaffe's deeper intention to create a philosphical dialogue with the viewer. As she put it in 1989: "I would like my paintings to give someone apart from me a sense of the possibilities of life, to awaken the energy [necessary] to confront, to act ...."(2)

By the time of the Gare Montparnasse photographs, Jaffe had already been living in Paris for close to 20 years. Born in New Jersey in 1923, she studied art at New York's Cooper Union and the Phillips Art School in Washington before arriving in Paris in 1949. For much of the '50s, Paris was home to a large number of young American painters. So-called "Second Generation" Abstract Expressionists like Jaffe, Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm and others were attracted not only by the French capital's traditional pleasures, but also by its distance from New York and the long shadows of older artists like Pollock and de Kooning.

Jaffe's work of the '50s and early '60s displays a spilling light, a sense of spatial depth and a sensual painterliness that can come as a shock to those familiar only with her later work; the current diversity of shapes is also present in embryonic, brushier form. As the '60s went on, Jaffe's compositions broke into increasingly separate, though still loosely handled shapes. By 1969, she was ready to make the dramatic step of dispensing with all traces of gesture, henceforth creating her forms with methodical, minutely controlled brushstrokes that seemed to cut her off completely from her Abstract Expressionist roots. However, another way to look at Jaffe's career is as that of a painter who began with gestural abstraction, which she later rejected in favor of hard-edge geometry. But quite soon, this geometry broke up into a variety of irregular shapes as the early gesturalism returned in another guise.

In large part because, unlike most of the other "Second Generation" painters, she didn't return to the United States (and until fairly recently didn't have a New York gallery), Jaffe's work has been better known in France than in her homeland. She has also had to contend with being hard to classify esthetically and geographically. Since the end of the '60s Jaffe has been a stylistic loner, forming a fiercely independent school of one. Apart from a tangential relation to the Pattern and Decoration movement of the late '70s (which Jaffe's flat, energetic, brightly colored shapes predated), her work seems to have stood apart from outside artistic developments. Her artistic nationality is equally hard to label. Most French commentators treat her as an American painter, yet not long ago she was included in a Cartier Foundation show titled "Too French."

Unapologetically ahistoric in her work, Jaffe is seemingly untroubled by affinities with earlier painters such as Stuart Davis or Matisse. (Confounding those who see a debt to Matisse, the artist points to Byzantine mosaics, Persian and Indian miniatures and 15th-century painters like Fouquet and Sassetta as precursors of her quirkily interlocked arrangements of colored shapes.)(3) Although this apparent flirtation with the past can lend Jaffe an almost postmodern aura, the meaning of her work is best sought within the boundaries of the canvas. Jaffe is so completely focused on the elaboration of the visual language of her paintings, on understanding and exercising her subtly varied lexicon of forms, that approaching her work through questions of style, period and nationality is ultimately of little use.