Art fair: Independent 20th Century: Alice Trumbull Mason

Galerie Lelong, New York is proud to participate in the 2026 edition of Independent 20^th Century with a solo booth of paintings by Alice Trumbull Mason, marking the gallery's inaugural public showing of her work. Focused on paintings created between the late 1950s and the 1960s, the presentation highlights a rarely exhibited facet of the artist's oeuvre. By revisiting this pivotal moment, the presentation aims to broaden art historical understanding of Mason's creative output and to reconsider how her work stood in dialogue with the changing formal priorities of the 1960s.

This will also be the first time Independent 20th Century has been held at the Breuer Building, the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where Mason was given a posthumous retrospective in 1973. Returning these paintings to that site carries particular resonance for her legacy.

In Mason's practice, the late 1950s through the 1960s were a period of renewed formal rigor, as increasingly hard-edged forms, sharpened geometry, and spatial economy came to define her compositions. As these developments emerged, Mason established a professional relationship with the influential dealer Richard "Dick" Bellamy, whose program at Green Gallery helped introduce the nascent language of Minimalism and other new tendencies in postwar American art. Bellamy and Mason met in 1958, when she was already an established figure in American abstraction and he was a young dealer at the outset of his career. Bellamy staged a solo exhibition for Mason at Hansa Gallery the following year, and would go on to include her in two group shows at his influential Green Gallery over the following decade. The works on view passed through his inventory across these two galleries.

Seen together, these works reveal Mason working at a critical juncture, sharpening a geometric vocabulary built over decades even as a new generation of artists began redefining the terms of abstraction around her. The presentation offers a timely opportunity to reconsider that exchange, and to recognize Mason not as a precursor sidelined by the movements that followed, but as an active participant in their formation.

A full-scale solo exhibition of Mason's work will open at Galerie Lelong, New York on January 7, 2027.