Emily Mason

Emily Mason was born on January 12, 1932, in New York City, the daughter of the pioneering American abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason and Warwood Edwin Mason, a sea captain. She grew up in an artistic household in Greenwich Village and attended New York City's High School of Music and Art. She then attended Bennington College, in the class of 1954, before leaving to transfer to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, from which she graduated in 1955.

In 1956 Mason received a two-year Fulbright grant to paint in Venice, where she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti. There she met the painter Wolf Kahn, whom she later married; the couple divided their time between a studio in Manhattan's Flatiron District and a home in Brattleboro, Vermont, and had two daughters. Mason emerged on New York's Tenth Street gallery scene in 1960 with her first solo exhibition at the Area Gallery, and went on to exhibit steadily in New York for the rest of her career. She taught painting at Hunter College for more than thirty years.

Mason died on December 10, 2019, at her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the age of 87, as reported by The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail, among other outlets. Her estate is now overseen by the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation.

Critics have consistently located Mason's work in the improvisational tradition of Abstract Expressionism while distinguishing her from its more anxious tendencies. Writing in Art in America, the critic Robert Berlind described her paintings as marked by an intimacy paired with an intensity that is gentle rather than confrontational, built from a structured, luminous space and robust color harmonies. Phong Bui, publisher of The Brooklyn Rail, framed her as occupying a position between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, noting that her painterly gestures coexist with thin, poured layers of color drawn from both memory and observation of the natural world. This reading, of Mason's abstraction as rooted in lived experience and place rather than pure formal experiment, has remained the through line of critical response from her 1960 debut at Area Gallery to her posthumous retrospectives.

Mason's documented all-time auction high is Like Frost Upon a Glass, a 1985 canvas that sold for USD 100,800 against a USD 15,000 to 20,000 estimate at Phillips New York on May 20, 2021. That sale followed closely on a Christie's auction days earlier, Fields of Vision, The Private Collection of Artists Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason (live sale May 18, 2021), which totaled USD 8,712,000 across works by both artists and included a work titled Aquifer that sold for USD 93,750, reported at the time as a new auction record for Mason before the Phillips sale surpassed it. Her market remains comparatively thin in volume relative to her critical standing, so any single result should be read in that context rather than as a smooth trend line.

Mason's auction history is comparatively short and concentrated in the last several years, driven in part by renewed institutional attention following her death in 2019, including a Bruce Museum retrospective and a major 2026 European solo exhibition at Almine Rech in Paris. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance research should route through the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation and her representing gallery, Miles McEnery. Because recorded auction sales remain few, collectors should treat any individual price, including the current record set at Phillips in 2021, as a data point rather than a settled benchmark.