Sans titre (1967) is a characteristic work of the turn Shirley Jaffe’s oeuvre took after 1963-1964, and her residency in Berlin, funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The particularly vivid and contrasting colors are applied more clearly—in lines varying in width or in rectangular blocks of colors— and structured by horizontal and vertical axes. The geometric organization of the canvas makes its debut here, but the artist’s mark-making and the traces of her tools still remain visible, present. With its more defined composition, this work also signals the shift toward an abstract imagery that echoes the cacophonous modernity of urban environments.

This marked the start of her great pictorial revolution. Shirley Jaffe developed a more analytical practice, based on geometry, but without, at first, doing away with gesture. Little by little, she organized all this pictorial matter, built a congruent whole, an architecture of colorful shapes that left little room for white, and in which internal dynamics and movement were all that mattered. For Shirley Jaffe, this period of emancipation and affirmation was like a “new adolescence”—which continued upon her return to Paris, in 1964, and her move to a studio-apartment she sublet from Louise Bourgeois. Sans titre (1967) was painted in the following months after the decisive Berlin experience.