Shirley Jaffe (artist) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Shirley Jaffe
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Jaffe in 1998
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| Born |
Shirley Sternstein
October 2, 1923 Elizabeth, New Jersey, U.S.
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| Died | September 29, 2016 (aged 92) Louveciennes, France
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| Nationality | American |
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| Spouse(s) | Irving Jaffe |
Shirley Jaffe (born Shirley Sternstein, October 2, 1923 – September 29, 2016) was an American painter known for her abstract art. At first, her paintings were in the abstract expressionist style, which used big, free brushstrokes. But in the late 1960s, she changed to a more geometric style, using clear shapes and straight lines. This new style was unique and different from what other artists were doing at the time. Shirley Jaffe lived and worked mostly in France for most of her life.
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Growing Up
Shirley Jaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Her parents were Benjamin and Anna Sternstein. She had two siblings, Jerry and Elaine. Her father ran a shirt factory, but he passed away when Shirley was 10 years old. After that, her mother moved the family to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
Shirley went to Abraham Lincoln High School. Then, she studied fine art at Cooper Union in New York City, finishing her studies in 1945.
After college, Jaffe worked in the print department of the New York Public Library. She also drew fashion sketches for the advertising department at the department store Macy's.
After she got married, she lived in Washington D.C. for a while and went to the Phillips Art School there. In 1949, she moved to Paris, France, because her husband was transferred there for his job. In Paris, she became friends with other American artists living abroad, like Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, and Joan Mitchell. Sam Francis introduced Shirley Jaffe to his art dealer, Jean Fournier, who liked her work and started showing it in his gallery.
Her Art Career
How Her Style Changed
Shirley Jaffe started as an abstract expressionist painter, using bold, expressive brushstrokes similar to Joan Mitchell. However, her style changed a lot in 1963. She received a special grant from the Ford Foundation that allowed her to spend a year in Berlin, Germany. This trip took her away from her artist friends in Paris and introduced her to new ideas, like the music of modern composers Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It also connected her thinking with European abstract artists like Jean Arp and Wassily Kandinsky.
Jaffe later said, "It [my style of painting] changed when I went to Berlin." She felt her earlier paintings looked too much like landscapes, which was not what she wanted. She wanted to "clear out the woods" and make her art more abstract.
Her new style featured smooth, flat surfaces with single-color shapes. She used mostly straight lines instead of curved ones. When she returned to Paris, her art dealer and friends were surprised by the change. But her dealer, Jean Fournier, continued to show her work. Later, art experts noticed that Jaffe's style was very different from other painters of her time. They described her work as having "incredible vitality" and being very complex. Her style developed slowly over many years, and it seemed to come from her own ideas, not from popular art trends. Because of this, she wasn't really part of any specific art movement.
Art Shows and Collections
Shirley Jaffe started having solo art shows in France in the early 1960s. Her very first solo show was in Bern, Switzerland, in 1962. After that, she became a regular part of the art scene in Paris.
American art galleries didn't start showing her work until the 1990s, many years after her early paintings. This delay might have been because other artists reacted strongly to the change in her painting style in the 1960s.
Overall, she had at least 25 exhibitions in France and the United States. In the U.S., her art was shown at places like the Holly Solomon Gallery, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In France, her work was shown at the Galerie Fournier, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Nathalie Obadia Gallery.
Her art can be found in the collections of important museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, and the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon.
In 2000, the city of Perpignan, France, asked Shirley Jaffe to design nine stained glass windows for a chapel there. The new windows were put in place at the same time as a special show of Jaffe's work at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Céret.
Personal Life and Passing
Shirley Jaffe's husband, Irving Jaffe, worked as a reporter for Agence France-Presse at the White House in the 1940s. They moved to Paris together when Irving was transferred to the news agency's office there. The couple divorced in 1962.
Shirley Jaffe passed away in Louveciennes, France, on September 29, 2016. She was 92 years old, just a few days before her 93rd birthday.
See also
In Spanish: Shirley Jaffe para niños
