Alice Trumbull Mason

Art Brokerage: Alice Trurnbull Mason American Artist: b. 1904-1971. Alice Trumbull Mason was already painting colorful biomorphic forms overlapping atop flat backgrounds in 1929, when nonobjective art wasn't widespread in the United States—let alone popular. The pioneering Mason co-founded American Abstract Artists in 1936, ultimately becoming president of this group that promoted acceptance of abstract art and mounted exhibitions for its members, which included Piet Mondrian and Robert Motherwell. In addition to her increasingly geometric paintings, Mason was a groundbreaking printmaker who introduced pattern and texture to works such as Orientation of Closed Forms (1945). She also used materials like crinkled tissue and fabric in her works, which were regularly exhibited in the AAA's group shows into the 1950s. Mason participated in group shows at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Guggenheim Museum) and Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery; she was given a posthumous retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. Her legacy is stewarded by her daughter, abstract painter Emily Mason. Listings wanted.