Paris in the years after World War II evolved to support a burgeoning population of international creative minds. Among the many Americans that relocated there was the American painter Shirley Jaffe who studied at Cooper Union Art School in New York. After marrying journalist Irving Jaffe in the mid- 1940’s they moved to Washington D.C., where she attended The Phillips Art School while he worked as the White House Correspondent for Agence France-Presse. In 1949 they made the voyage to France. Her husband, who like many received financial assistance through the GI Bill, continued to work for the news agency while studying at the Sorbonne. After a brief return to live and work in New York around 1952, Shirley would eventually settle in Paris for the remainder of her life. It would be in Paris, and an incredibly informative few years in Berlin (through a 1963 grant from the Ford Foundation) that Jaffe would create her unique and beautifully complex style of paintings.

When the artist Sam Francis moved to Paris in late 1950, one of the first people he soon met was Shirley Jaffe. Their community of friends, growing over the years, would meet often and socialize over a coffee or beer at various cafes, with the Les Trois Marronniers, a cafe on the rue du Dragon one of their favorite spots. Frequently, they were joined by the American artists Joan Mitchell and Norman Bluhm, and French-Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, as well as American writer Rachel Jacobs and French art historian Georges Duthuit (son-in law of Henri Matisse). Jaffe also became close friends with Muriel Goodwin, a very talented painter, who married Francis in 1955.

It was not uncommon for artists to visit one another in their studios and thankfully the Sam Francis Foundation archives contains some rare and quite stunning photos of Shirley Jaffe in Francis’s Paris studios.