Gregory Masurovsky Drawings: Drawing from the Bronx-born, Paris-based, consummate draftsm

Drawing, for Gregory Masurovsky, was ‘to sculpt in light’. In his portrait drawings, as much as his still-lifes and nudes, the extensive variety and range in his black on white also recalls the chiaroscuro in Old Master drawings, as much as the soft tonality of George Seurat and Eugène Carrière and the precision of the early works on paper by Lucien Freud.

At Black Mountain College in North Carolina Masurovsky disliked the authoritarian approach of Josef Albers and turned to other subjects such as carpentry, psychodrama, poetry and economics. After a stint in the army he returned to New York and it was there that he discovered graphic media. In 1953 he married fellow art student Shirley Goldfarb (1925- 1980). The following year they used their meagre savings for a one-way boat trip to France. Their first night in Paris was spent talking to artists in the cafés of Montparnasse. Their son, Marc Jean, was born in 1956.

The interplay between text and images were crucial to Masurovsky’s thinking process. He was able to turn a text into drawing. In 1956 he was introduced to the French poet and writer, Michel Butor (1926-2016) and the two went on to collaborate for forty years on a series of books and manuscripts.

During the 60s, 70s and 80s the Masurovskys mixed with the Paris scene, which included Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yves Saint Laurent and Alberto Giacometti. They were often at Café de Flore, especially Shirley who would sit there every day for twenty-five years and who struck a distinctive figure in her long black dyed hair, Beatnik clothing of a roll-neck sweater, jeans and high-heel clog boots accompanied by her wiry Yorkshire terrier.

David Hockney adored Shirley, “I thought she was funny,” he recalled. “She liked mocking things, and we became quite good friends. I used to dine at the Coupole a lot and Shirley would come looking for me... She and Gregory lived very modestly, but she thought they were privileged living in the most beautiful city in the world.” Fascinated by their relationship and contrasting characters, Hockney saw them as a subject for a new double portrait.