Shirley Goldfarb

Shirley Goldfarb (1925-1980) belongs to the second generation of American expressionist artists. After studying comedy at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York for a few months, she eventually worked at the Art Students League where she met her husband, Gregory Masurovsky, designer and printmaker. She moved with him to Paris in 1954 for three months, and settled there permanently.

There, she attended John Hutlberg, Sam Francis, David Hockney, Paul Jenkins, Joan Mitchell, Yves Klein, Man Ray and even Yves Saint-Laurent. The gallery owner Paul Facchetti presented his first solo exhibition in 1956. It is in an abstract way that she approaches her painting, and through her visual language, she can free herself from any model and give free rein to her imagination. “I'm Shirley nobody. I am my own event. "When I face this canvas measuring two by three meters, with its spots of color and empty white spaces, and when I touch it with my knife loaded with paint, it is the part of me that I love" she explains in her diary. Shirley Goldfarb kept a diary between 1971 and 1980. Her adaptation to the theater in 2000 by Caroline Loeb with Judith Magre in the role of Shirley confirms her notoriety with the general public and reveals an artist in the grip of loneliness in a Paris of the years filled with 1970s. frivolity and recklessness. Shirley Goldfarb talks about her encounters with Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Yves Saint-Laurent, Michel Butor, her affection for Gregory Masurovsky, her life companion, the cruelty and indifference of the art world , luxury, misery, a keen sense of destiny ...

His diary allows you to follow both his work as a painter and his life marked by difficulties. It is a woman's gaze that she casts on a Paris that she loves, that of the artists and fashion world of the Left Bank, of which she draws portraits and dreams of success. Caroline Loeb says about her: “When I was sixteen and I met her at the vernissages of the galleries of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was first and foremost a character. Flanked by her husband Gregory and her dog Sardi, she impressed me at every party. to all worldly events. I remember the slight condescension or the taunts she was subjected to. And for good reason. She was a painter and she didn't sell, or at least not a lot. Supreme sin: she was broke. Sailing in the jet set of the seventies, she transformed the harshness of her life into dandyism, and called herself a 'professional picnic' ”.

Galerie Guillaume organized two personal exhibitions of Shirley Goldfarb in 2013: at Art Paris at the Grand Palais and at the gallery (large and small formats).