By the end of her life Shirley Jaffe had become a myth, the last American post-war artist in Paris.
Now she is being canonized with a major exhibition in the Center Pompidou there.
It takes a trained eye to decipher her work, but not to find access to it.
For the children among the visitors, their dancing, flickering, meandering color fields are a game.
Her triumph was the late work, beginning around 1980. Despite the moderate success with the large format, she succeeded this year with “Hollywood”, on loan from the Paris Musée d'art Moderne for the retrospective.
It seems like a jigsaw puzzle that someone started to piece together from the edges and then forgot.
In the middle is a pale yolk-yellow color field, on which isolated shapes have remained lying like Lego Duplo bricks.
The muted yet vibrant colors all appear to have been borrowed from South America.
Intuitively accessible works
Borrowed, quoted, turned inside out: This astonishing work only reaches its destination via detours.
The goal is a harmonious composition that causes unrest when viewed.
One wants to participate intuitively in the great intellectual symposium that must have preceded creation.
The proportion of what an image shows is negligible compared to what it hides.
In the diptychs it doubles the effect.
The left half of All Together (1993), dominated by deep blue floating forms, belongs to the world of contemplation;
the right one looks like Matisse as a pop poster, all fairground and show.
Her best works make fun of togetherness - "all together" - and instead shine in simultaneity.
Every coincidence was planned well in advance: a display case shows boxes about the size of postcards, on which she roughly sketches the shapes and their position;
also the title of the future painting.
She writes what color the shapes will have, in French.
If she changes color, she crosses out the word on the card and puts a new one under it.
While the record of idea and execution becomes illegible, a palimpsest, the painting grows into pure visuality.
It is also a process of unlearning, notes the curator Frédéric Paul in the catalogue.
Shirley Sternstein, born in New Jersey in 1923 and raised in Brooklyn, came to Paris in 1949 as Mrs. Jaffe.
The marriage did not survive the European adventure.
The young painter stayed.
In 1969 she rented an apartment at 8 rue Saint-Victor, on the fourth floor.
This had two windows facing the street.
There were five meters between the walls.
The unfinished paintings were on the right, the finished ones on the left.
When she died in autumn 2016, there were unsold pictures from the 1950s in the back room, freshly painted like yesterday.
Her real secret was how to endure such a life.
The dichotomy of expressionism
The exhibition traces this artistic life in forms.
Only the early pictures, iridescent fields of applied colors.
Here as brush fires, there as islands in the ice.
Sure, it was supposed to be “Abstract Expressionism”, the style of the time, the currency of the hour, but in fact she was eclecticly walking between Claude Monet and Willem de Kooning, searching in a literal sense.
Then she simplified the colors, gave them shape.
Between 1970 and 1972 she stacked purely monochrome fields into almost outrageous vertical paintings, a minimalist excess.
The paradox knocks.
A few years later, a white appears on which the forms seem to float.
The lighter the scaffolding, the more serious the undertaking.
To subtitle the exhibition "Une Américaine à Paris" must have been a late inspiration, because the extremely elegantly produced, bilingual catalog is simply called "Shirley Jaffe".
Of course, the competition from the art cities of Paris and New York provides a great cliché on which almost anything can be depicted.
But what was really important for Jaffe was her stay in West Berlin, at the invitation of the Ford Foundation, in 1963/64, together with the composers Elliott Carter and Iannis Xenakis.
This year she recognizes the task of Abstract Expressionism to draw from oneself as obsolete.
Saying farewell to the idea of genius releases strength.
A reality of its own
For many years to come, her reception in Paris will be overshadowed by Joan Mitchell's, who sticks to the expressive formula, in a very large format.
The early death of his friend and competitor (represented by Galerie Jean Fournier) reveals Jaffe's bold, late-period structuralist work.
She moves to Nathalie Obadia's gallery, suddenly among all young artists.
It has also been exhibited in New York since 1999, by Tibor Nagy.
Why Shirley Jaffe couldn't return to America ultimately remains a mystery, as does her art.
She jumped from floe to floe;
from idea to material, from material to practice, from practice to reality.
That's what she wanted to achieve with her painting, a reality of her own, something inescapably contemporary, and she achieved it.
She was a worthy, headstrong Joan of Arc of the art world, a painter with spear and sword.
Shirley Jaffe. An American Woman in Paris
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Center Pompidou, Paris, until August 29th.
Then in the Musée Matisse, Nice, and in the Kunstmuseum Basel.
The catalog costs 39 euros.