Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, and a direct descendant of the famed Revolutionary-era painter John Trumbull, Mason studied painting at the British Academy in Rome as a teenager before continuing her education at the National Academy of Art with Charles Hawthorne. It was after she enrolled at the Grand Central School of Art that Mason was influenced by encounters with European modernism and the teachings of Arshile Gorky. In 1929, she began non-objective painting, developing a singular visual language that positioned her among the earliest American artists to fully embrace geometric abstraction. |