Latitude of Identical Shapes

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, an era during which Social Realism and Regionalism featured extensively in art in the United States, Mason remained a devoted and active proponent of abstraction, especially as a member of American Abstract Artists, an advocacy group begun officially in 1936 by likeminded painters, including, among others, Burgoyne Diller, and George L. K. Morris. During this period, she transformed her painting practice from a biomorphic to a geometric, hard-edge idiom. An example of this new style she called "architectural abstraction," Latitude of Identical Shapes presents a rigorous geometric composition filled with modified, generally composite rectangular forms in a palette of deep red-brown and blue offset by light gray and off-white. Like much of Mason’s work from this period, the painting explores the relationship between the two-dimensional picture plane and the illusion of three-dimensional space predicated on overlapping forms. Its upright design is anchored by a large shape running down the center, one whose formal integrity as a would-be rectangle is interrupted by the intrusion of smaller shapes. More intricate forms appear in combination, including "L" shapes rotated in different directions around the painting’s perimeter, dynamically denying any singular point of focus. Small circles evenly distributed throughout the painting offer distinct visual foils to the proliferation of right angles. A preliminary drawing augmented by Mason with color annotations reveals her careful plotting of the composition, which she carried over exactly in the painting. The artist’s concept of "architectural abstraction" evokes her awareness of abstraction’s potentially broad and useful application across design, architecture, and painting (and beyond), an interest shared by many other abstract artists active throughout the early twentieth century, including Piet Mondrian, whom Mason knew personally and whose work she admired.

In 1969, Mason wrote a letter to then-Met Director Thomas Hoving that at once attested to her own credentials and history in abstraction and commended him for developments at the Museum under his tenure. "Having been an abstract artist since 1929," she noted, "I am certainly very happy that the Metropolitan Museum, under your guidance, is showing works of this nature." The pretext of her complimentary correspondence to Hoving was likely The Met’s exhibition that year, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, which featured many major examples of works by abstract artists based in the city, including Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella, among others. Notably, curator Henry Geldzahler included only one woman, Helen Frankenthaler. Like many other women artists working in New York at that time who had equally committed and adept explorations of abstraction, it is not surprising that Mason will have felt aggrieved by her omission from the exhibition, which was considered a sea change in the Museum’s engagement with modern and contemporary art. Revealingly, she took the opportunity of her letter to Hoving to enclose brochures of two recent shows of her work, clearly in hopes of spurring his interest in it: "I am enclosing a brochure of my two 1967 solo shows, which indicates that I am represented in all the big collections." However, in the end, The Met never acquired her work during her lifetime; Latitude of Identical Shapes was a gift from the artist’s daughter, Emily, and her husband, Wolf Kahn, who were both artists in their own right.