Born Alice Bradford Trumbull in 1904 in Litchfield, Connecticut, Alice Trumbull Mason was raised in an affluent family with a distinguished artistic lineage; one of her ancestors was the Revolutionary-era painter John Trumbull (1756–1843). For much of her childhood, Mason lived in Europe. In 1921–22, while still in her teens, she began taking courses in painting at the British Academy of Arts, Rome. After returning to the United States and moving to New York, she attended Charles W. Hawthorne’s classes at the National Academy of Design, and in 1927–28 studied at the Grand Central School of Art with Arshile Gorky, who introduced her to European modernism. This avant-garde turn and her encounter with Byzantine mosaics, Greek Archaic sculpture, and Italian medieval and early Renaissance painting during a 1928 tour of Greece and Italy proved formative for her artistic development. In 1929, Mason produced her first nonobjective paintings, beginning what would become an unwavering, life-long commitment to pure abstraction. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Mason’s paintings and etchings (she was also a prolific printmaker) featured biomorphic forms that reflect her interest in the work of Vasily Kandinsky and also recall—notwithstanding her antagonism to Surrealism—that of Joan Miró. Beginning in the mid-1940s, profoundly influenced by Piet Mondrian, Mason turned to more geometric, pared-down forms organized within decentralized, allover compositions. As with other works at this time, Emergent Form (1945) was signed in two different places, allowing for alternate orientations. In its layering of hard-edge, rectilinear elements with organic, curvilinear forms and painterly passages, the painting bridges the earlier and later phases of Mason’s work. In 1936, together with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ibram Lassaw, and other peers, Mason was a founding member of American Abstract Artists (AAA). A regular contributor to the group’s annual exhibitions into the 1950s, she also served as its treasurer (1939), secretary (1940–45), and president (1959–63). Mason’s paintings were included in several group exhibitions at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the precursor to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) between 1944 and 1950, as well as group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s museum-gallery Art of This Century, New York (1943), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1945). Mason had her first solo exhibition at artist and collector Albert Eugene Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, New York, in 1942. Although no other museum shows were dedicated to her work during her lifetime, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective in 1973. Mason died in New York on June 28, 1971.