Shirley Goldfarb (1925-1980)

Shirley Goldfarb, my father's younger sister, was the only member of my branch of the Goldfarb family to have achieved global fame and recognition for her work. She was a listed artist who produced many sensitive and forceful abstract paintings in her studio in Paris. I only met her personally once, at that time being too young to take advantage of the experience to glean any salient facts about her. The biographical information I present here is a combination of what I have heard from other family members and what I have been able to research through other sources.

Shirley Goldfarb, known to me as "Aunt Sissy," was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1925 to Charles and Lena Goldfarb. Inasmuch as both her parents as well as her only sibling are all deceased, I cannot comment much on her childhood. However, she achieved a degree of fame in her adulthood, so I can find many extrafamilial sources of information about the rest of her life.

In 1954 Shirley, who had been studying art in New York since 1950, met and married artist Gregory Masurovsky, with whom she later bore a son, Marc. The couple moved to Paris in 1954, joining a bohemian expatriate community there that included Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, Shirley Jaffee, and Paul Jenkins. At her studio, she produced large-scale, abstract canvases using interesting brush/knife techniques and a limited color palette.Shirley lived a full and robust life in her adopted home, spending much time in its brasseries and left bank cafés, where she sat for many hours daily writing a personal journal, which was posthumously translated into French and published as Shirley Goldfarb, Carnets Montparnasse: 1971-1980 (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1994). It was later adapted to become a popular stage play.

Her abstract impressionistic paintings are well known in France, but her first solo showing in the U.S. came long after her death, in 1997, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Collections of her works are shown regularly at the Zabriskie Galleries in Paris and New York. Other works of hers exist in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as at The Georges Pompidou Center and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

In the late 1970s, Shirley fought cancer unsuccessfully, although Andy Warhol ironically recorded in his diary in 1978 that "Shirley Goldfarb was there, and she's just beat her cancer…" Shirley finally succumbed to cancer two years later, in 1980.