Shirley Jaffe

Shirley Jaffe (, October 2, 1923 – September 29, 2016) was an American abstract painter. Her early work is of the gestural abstract expressionist style, however in the late 1960s she changed to a more geometric style. her parents were Benjamin and Anna (née Levine) Sternstein. Jaffe had two siblings by the name of Jerry and Elaine. Her father ran a shirt factory; however he died when Jaffe was 10. Her mother moved the family to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Jaffe attended Abraham Lincoln High School. She then studied fine art at Cooper Union in New York City, earning a certificate in 1945. She became part of a circle of ex-pat American artists which included Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell. Francis introduced Jaffe to his dealer, Jean Fournier, who became interested in Jaffe's work and began showing her art in his gallery.

Career

Style Jaffe began as an abstract expressionist, using gesture in her painting in a similar way to Joan Mitchell.

It was no coincidence that Jaffe was awarded the Ford Foundation grant in 1963 due to the political climate that was engulfing the world, not to mention especially in Berlin. "The Wall had just been built, it was the moment of Kennedy's death. We were very marked by that wall, by the situation in Berlin, in the world." The Ford Foundation artist-in-residence grants, which in 1964 merged with the German Academic Exchange Service program, were originally intended, like many other American funded cultural initiatives, to counter Soviet cultural influences. During this time it is said that Jaffe's style had taken a change and her art had portrayed her experiences in the split city of Berlin.

Jaffe's new style featured flat, uninflected surfaces, single-colour shapes and predominantly straight, rather than curved, lines.

Exhibitions

Although Jaffe began exhibiting in solo shows in France in the early 1960s, her first solo exhibition took place in Bern, Switzerland in 1962. It was shortly after that she truly settled into the Parisian art scene and lifestyle. American galleries only began to show her work from the 1990s, years later from her earlier works. This delay has been attributed to the critical response of other artists to the change in her painting style in the 1960s. the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

In 2000, the state government and the City of Perpignan commissioned Jaffe to design nine stained glass windows for the city's chapel.

Shirley Jaffe was the subject of a major solo exhibition touring the Centre Pompidou (2022) , the Kunstmuseum Basel (2023) , and the Musée Matisse in Nice (2023/24), reflecting renewed institutional recognition of her work within the postwar abstract art scene.

Foundation In 2025, descendants of the artist established the Shirley Jaffe Foundation, dedicated to the preservation, research, publication, and dissemination of her artistic work. The Foundation has initiatied a catalogue raisonné project to comprehensively document her oeuvre.

Personal life and death

Her husband, Irving Jaffe, was the White House correspondent for Agence France-Presse in the 1940s. They moved to Paris together when Irving was transferred to the Paris office of the news agency. The couple divorced in 1962.