Jeanne Masoero : A Survey

This is the first book on artist Jeanne Masoero (born 1937), one of the leading exponents of 'lyrical abstraction' - a term used by the English critic Sarah Kent to describe a range of late twentieth-century artists whose work, although abstract, is also related to and in communion with the external world, and which has a certain lyrical quality.

Her particular concern with colour, light and spatial depth has been evident from the great clouds and glowing bars of colour of the first London exhibitions, to the mature work of the present where, using her own, unique method of composition, she creates thousands of tiny grains of colour, which combine to form paintings of striking power and light.

Jeanne Masoero is an English citizen but the roots of her culture are European. At Goldsmiths College, London she began a lifelong friendship with the constructivist artists Kenneth and Mary Martin. She proceeded to the Slade, where she became a star pupil of William Coldstream. Her earliest paintings were made with transparent layers of fluid colour on a white ground, and she moved from there to using torn canvas, soaked in thinned paint, to provide the colour field with a new and calculated stress factor.

A visit to the Mayan sites in the Yucatan led to a wholly new series of works using all white folded paper and layered reliefs. This gave rise to her Basis for Light exhibitions at the ICA, London and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 1979. The pursuit of a more deep-seated structure, combined with a study of American Indian patterns and of mapping techniques, led Masoero to produce a large body of black-and-white work, before finally returning to colour in the Roads and Sky series of the early 1980s.