“There was no one way to be in the 1970s. The period was about self-definition and experimentation,” said the art historian and curator Dr. Barbara Stehle, who recently rediscovered Emily Mason’s presence in a 1974 group photo featuring Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Nancy Graves, Jo Baer, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, James Rosenquist, Joseph Kosuth, and others. “They embody the 1970s: long hair, short skirts, shades, and free spirits. Some laugh, some smile, some are cool, some aren’t. They are artists, and that means something different to each of them.”

The Thunder Hurried Slow explores a distinct phase in the career of an artist whose circle of influence spans three generations of art history—from being nurtured into the American Abstraction movement by way of her artist-mother Alice Trumbull Mason’s close circle of friends including Josef Albers; Ad Reinhardt; and Piet Mondrian; to serving as a professor and lifelong mentor to contemporary artists including Nari Ward.

Rather than a career survey, this exhibition and its literary accompaniment deliberately stop short of Emily Mason’s 1979 career delineation that occurred when she moved her New York art practice to a sprawling art studio of her own. Instead, The Thunder Hurried Slow conveys honest insight into a deeply inventive early period of Mason’s career—a time in which the 1970s cultural climate melded with a pressure cooker of personal circumstances to yield a foundational body of work that fascinatingly speaks to the larger oeuvre that Mason would round out in the four decades that followed.

Born in New York City in 1932 to on the scene painter Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily came of age in the 1940s and 1950s New York art world, attending her mother’s regular social engagements at the Eighth Street Club with John Cage, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others. Mason’s family was particularly close with Sally and Milton Avery, as well as Elaine and Willem de Kooning; the latter would babysit Mason’s daughters from time to time. Emily Mason credits the small female contingent of The Club, especially Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, with empowering her to chart her own stylistic course after having been encouraged at The Cooper Union to maintain a more rigid developmental trajectory in her practice.

Formally, Mason is perhaps best known for her vibrant pigments and her intuitive grasp of color theory, as well as her unusual painting method that she mastered over the course of her career: using cat food tins, she mixed pigments and solvents to specific and varied consistencies, then poured them directly onto the canvas in a curious interplay with her painting’s other ‘pours.’ Crucial to the overall process was the time (or sometimes, the lack thereof) elapsed between these poured layers. Often, Mason would gesturally spread out the poured paint layer with a paintbrush (the one she had used to mix that tin), or apply other physical treatments such as scraping, sanding, finger painting, or contact with an unconventional tool such as an old t-shirt. Each of Mason’s paintings represents a calculated series of interactions between each mixed paint tin’s distinct alchemy; perhaps a given paint mixture would yield a crackling effect, a glossy sheen, or an ‘oil and water’ dispersion.

In 1965, just years before the earliest work in this exhibition was created, Emily Mason and her artist-husband Wolf Kahn (a German-born Holocaust survivor to whom she was married for 62 years at the time of her 2019 death) settled in Mason’s hometown of New York City after residing in Europe on and off since 1956. On the top floor of a Greenwich Village walk-up, they lived with two young daughters, one an infant, and Mason kept an art studio within the couple’s bedroom. In the early-1970s, Kahn began to experience significant recognition as an artist, and while this meant more financial stability, it compounded Mason’s household responsibilities and reduced her time in the studio. “The ’70s were difficult times as bringing up children, running a household, and continuing to paint all pulled me in different directions,” reflected Mason in 2003.