1941

Brown Shapes White

American, 1904 - 1971

Alice Trumbull Mason was a founding member of American Abstract Artists, a cooperative group of painters and sculptors established in 1936 to promote abstract art in the face of a hostile public who viewed modernism as a suspicious European import. The reductive simplicity and floating spatial relationships of Brown Shapes White define it as a classic example of Mason’s “architectural” abstractions, which she described as “making colour, density, dark and light, rhythm and balance work together without depending on references and associations.” The composition is enlivened by a complex interplay between irregular organic forms and linear geometric scaffolding.