Alice Trumbull Mason

Magnitude of Regions

Coined as a pioneer of abstraction as early as the 1930s, painter Alice Trumbull Mason participated in creative scenes between Europe and the United States. She was an early leading figure of the American Abstract Artists in New York City and an active poet. Her practice in avant-garde ideas and non-representational abstraction was overlooked in her lifetime despite setting a precedence for work by Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s.

Magnitude of Regions was produced later during Mason's life and these works diverged from her early style through a new emphasis on geometry and repetition. Responding to the personal tragic loss of her son, the artist mirrored her emotional state onto the blocks of color in these works. This sense of grief is powerful in the composition’s absence of space, which might reflect the artist’s ultimate choice to no longer show her paintings in public during the remainder of her lifetime.