As part of the festivities at the 2023 edition of Art Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel has organized three special exhibitions, showing works by Shirley Jaffe, Andrea Büttner, and Charmion von Wiegand.
The choice to include Jaffe, with such a detailed retrospective, should not surprise anyone. Born in the USA in 1923, she lived and worked primarily on the European scene, until her death in 2016. Her work crosses several stylistic borders, being initially influenced by the more abstract side of the French Impressionism, playing loosely with Abstract Expressionism, and finally settling on unordered chaos.
Jaffe’s originality was recognized early and championed by the Swiss art historian Arnold Rüdlinger, who curated several shows, in Basel and in Paris. He was quite taken with “what was for the time being an alien American painting” and showed Jaffe in 1958, as part of the exhibition Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith. In the catalog, he explains what attracts him to Jaffe’s work: its “entirely non-European sense of space, which dispenses with a center, perspective, and harmonious proportions.”
Jaffe’s interpretation of one of Renoir’s paintings absorbs the space around it, in a halucinant implosive dance. Jaffe later explained that her painting Which in the World (1957, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne) is a direct reference of Renoir’s Le dejeuner des canotiers (1880-1881, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, akg-images). We see this by their juxtaposition:
Jaffe’s work is complex and playful in its variety. The thick layers of paint and the lack of white space of her early paintings are all but forgotten in the later ones. Her painting seems to take a writerly character: the white space adds tension to the depthless geometry infusing color with unexpected dynamism. What is not said becomes heavier than what is shown; what is imagined balances the seemingly innocent juxtaposition of square, circles, and triangles.
In Hollywood, we see the original Smiley emoji: but it is square and its surly countenance keeps us at a distance.
In Playground, an urban landscape is mapped from above. This is a dyptich: the merrymaking we’re invited to in the labyrinthine discovery on the right is all but disintegrated like the splatter of a black rotten tomato, on the left.
The show is on view until July 30th, 2023, so visitors still have some time to “discover the artist’s inquisitive and idiosyncratic view of the world”, as the exhibition’s pamphlet lightheartedly proclaims.