She was born Shirley Sternstein in New Jersey in 1923 and moved to Paris in 1949 as Mrs Jaffe. Although her marriage to journalist Irving Jaffe did not last long, the painter remained in France. She quickly found her footing and met regularly with the American “art expats” then living in Paris — Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell, who arrived somewhat later. During that period, her work can be associated with Abstract Expressionism, an art that sought to draw only from itself and consisted primarily of wildly applied fields of colour and gestures — at the time a successful formula for surviving in the art market. But Jaffe left that path. A Ford Foundation grant took the artist to West Berlin for a year in 1963. The circumstance of working in a divided city gave her new impulses and ultimately led to a radically independent formal language.
