Shirley Goldfarb (1925-1980) was a central figure of the Montparnasse and the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the 1960s and 1970s, until her death in the autumn of 1980 following a long illness. How would this American woman born in the mid-1920s in Altoona (Pennsylvania) within a conservative Jewish family, destined for the rabbinate by her theological studies, become a rigorous abstract painter then, in the last ten years of her life, a frenetic diarist ?
A few words are necessary to resituate Goldfarb in the moment that interests us, namely the decade of the 1970s, when she keeps a very abundant personal diary1. After having lived in New York in the 1940s, oscillating first between studies of singing and of theatre, she becomes a life model at the Art Students League before obtaining a scholarship to study there, from 1949 to 1954. She experiments in the figurative register with various mediums : lithography, aquatint, woodcut and painting. In 1954, with Gregory Masurovsky, whom she married the previous year and who enjoys the favourable status granted by the G.I. Bill, which allows him to go and study abroad, she settles in Paris, with the prospect of staying there only a few months. She will live there until her death : her son Marc Masurovsky is born there in 1956, and she will rent a single studio there, a small space located rue Liancourt, not far from Montparnasse, right next to another studio where the family resides. At once close to many American expatriates and belonging to no group, she develops in Paris a solitary work, which moves first towards abstract expressionism, after a tachist period, breaking with the figuration of her beginnings. Without meeting with financial success or being represented by a Parisian gallery, she is nevertheless exhibited regularly in the French capital and supported by a few patrons and critics. Her painting changes considerably after the year 1967, during which she and her spouse are briefly back in the United States to teach at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. Following this stay, her canvases become more monumental, and she definitively adopts very large formats (3 metres by 2). On 27 July 1971, she begins to write a diary, which she will keep rigorously until her death on 28 December 1980.
Paradoxically, one can say that Shirley Goldfarb remains a relative unknown in the history of art, whether in her country of origin – left too early – or of adoption – where she was above all recognised as a public figure of the 1970s. Her personal discipline of work and of life, leading her to take long walks each day between her apartment, her studio, and the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (the Flore, Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp, the Bonaparte, the Balzar…) or of Montparnasse (Le Select, La Coupole…) where she meticulously kept her diary, describing the picturesque daily spectacle of Paris, shaped a singular persona. With her fringe cut in a perfectly straight line, her jet-black hair and eyeliner make-up, her little dog Sardi who was in the habit of defecating in places not intended for it, her notebooks kept several times a day, Shirley Goldfarb did not go unnoticed. The 75 notebooks that make up this quasi-decade of writing were preserved by Gregory Masurovsky, and are today held at the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC). Given their density, they have never been published in full, but extracts were translated into French in a first edition conceived by her husband in 19942. More than twenty years after it, a new expanded edition, supplemented with drawings from the notebooks, was published, at the initiative of her son Marc Masurovsky3.
Today, her works are little present in public collections ; fewer than ten of them are owned by a few institutions (the CNAP, the FRAC Île-de-France, the Musée d’art moderne de Paris and the Centre Georges Pompidou). Although absent from the exhibition « Elles font l’abstraction » (2021) at the MNAM, Goldfarb has for some years been arousing renewed interest. Witness the recent presentation (2024-2025) of her imposing Yellow painting (1965), a large canvas more than three metres long, in the permanent collections of the museum before its closure. Some of her works were also shown in the exhibition « United States of Abstraction : artistes américains en France, 1946-1964 » (2021) at the Musée d’arts de Nantes and at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. However, one must ask why she who rubbed shoulders – without necessarily developing sustained friendships – with Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Yves Klein or Shirley Jaffe in Paris has remained on the margins of the more established narratives. A certain number of reasons can doubtless explain it, but the combination of two of them appears fairly clear today : the artist’s uncertain command of the French language – which was an important factor in the sidelining of many non-French-speaking artists settled in Paris in the post-war period, leading to the creation of purely English-speaking networks of sociability – added to the artistic solitude of Goldfarb, visibly little interested in the idea of joining a group, made of them an ideal cocktail to distance the artist from certain heroic narratives. From the beginnings of her diary, she mentions it, without however deploring what she also perceives as a way of being in the art world : « as such it is difficult not to fit into a ‘bande’. i must always be a loner that is the destiny fabricated from a rather sturdy ‘tissue’»4.
Generally speaking, solitude is a recurring subject in the diary of Shirley Goldfarb, who writes for example in July 1979 : « i am a solitary who puts herself in solitary confinement even in a crowd »5. In this context, the solitude of the act of painting seems to have been counterbalanced by the writing of the diary, necessarily written in public places, allowing the artist to describe everything she saw and analysed, speaking ill of her contemporaries at leisure with a biting ferocity. The partial editions of the Carnets, in 1994 then 2018, give an account of Goldfarb’s so singular writing, of her incisive humour, of her taste for mixing her mother tongue and the expressions learned in her country of adoption. In reading her, it is however complex to grasp whether she perceived herself as much a writer as a painter. Yet, from the beginnings of her diary, when she makes the « solemn vow » to write each day in her notebook6, she rejoices at this promise : « I love to write one letter after another. It is such a miracle to know how to write a word and magically word after word become sentences »7. She even wonders, the next day, linking the two practices : « i am painting with words i am painting with paint i am painting with actions am i an action word painting painter? […] i write words on paper the way i paint color on canvas. it is pleasure to sculpt a letter which becomes a word which becomes a sentence which becomes a paragraph of a poem story painting »8. The enthusiasm of writing is contagious : « i am in love with the movement of my pen as it glides along the paper making words which can be read. the forming of letters and words on paper is a miracle of our civilization: it gives me a thrill to dessiner words. to write sentences which express thoughts important only to myself.9 » Eight years later, the observation is more distant : « somebody asked if i was a writer because i write in a notebook. no i’m not a writer friend. but I do write. it’s the same for painting. i “paint” but i’m not a painter….»10
The extracts that I would like to present here do not concern writing, nor the acid observations that Shirley Goldfarb made of Parisians and other café lovers passing through her favourite brasseries. They relate to a darker part of the artist’s diary, and yet so important : at the very end of the year 1971, she is the victim of a serious road accident. Struck by a lorry and hospitalised, she suffers a triple fracture of the right forearm – a stroke of chance for the painter, who is left-handed – and sees her face, which was riddled with shards of glass, brutally altered. From then on, existential questionings occupy a capital place in her diary, intensify further from 1978, when the artist discovers that she suffers from cirrhosis of the liver, an erroneous diagnosis by the doctors who later recognise the presence of an already advanced ovarian cancer. Treated by chemotherapy, she experiences a relapse in 1979, leading to her premature death at the age of 55, after long months of suffering during which she oscillates between resignation, hope, anger, distress, relaxation, optimism...
It is these overwhelming pages that I wish today to present, from extracts chosen over the last two years of her life. They are an unvarnished testimony on cancer, in a period when the illness still remained largely silenced and set aside. But beyond the historical aspect of such accounts, it is the life drive of Shirley Goldfarb that is striking : in the midst of the inevitable discouragements in the face of an ineluctable end, the artist fears neither humour, nor provocation, with a sense of the formula that is her own : « eternal life would suit me best » she writes in February 1979. A year later, addressing death directly, she explodes : « You cant have me ass-hole. not now or for 65 years or 30. Get lost… I’m the boss. » Her notes go against everything one could expect from a cancer patient, and a fortiori from a female patient : while questioning the consequences on the outside perception of her femininity, she confronts with a sometimes disarming lucidity what lies in wait for her. Her refusal of death must not be considered as a denial, but as the desire to make life triumph at all costs : « each day i rise up as a newborn baby » she writes in May 1979. A few months later, tired of everything except life, she writes to herself : « i am alive! i live i breathe i continue my habits ». Moved by the beauty of her contemporaries, of trees or of birds, she remains faithful to what she was before tipping into illness : « Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb », she asserts in November 1979. You bet. And indeed, until the end, she persisted in painting, in writing, and even in singing – she gave an a capella concert in July 1980, a few months before her death, while she was completing large monochromes. Her final work, writes Marc Masurovsky, was an abstract canvas, neither white nor black like many of those she had painted in the last years of her life, but in tones of red, yellow and violet11. Her diary was kept rigorously, daily, until the last days.
Some of these texts were translated in the edition of the Carnets of 1994 (éd. Quai Voltaire) or 2018 (La Table Ronde), but their publication in their original language remains unprecedented, and the majority of them will, I hope, be a discovery for readers. In order not to weigh down the text with footnotes, I prefer to specify in this introduction the notebooks to which I refer12. Moreover, I have tried to preserve the singular writing of Shirley Goldfarb, the regular absence of capital letters, specifically for the word « I » (« je »), the refusal of apostrophes in English words that should normally have them (« don’t », « it’s »), the rhythmic line breaks, the insertions of French expressions or words. The typos have however been corrected in square brackets. When it seemed necessary to me, I also added a few footnotes to contextualise the facts mentioned. I wish here to thank Marc Masurovsky for his trust, his time and his eye, essential to bring this project to completion ; the IMEC teams for having allowed me to consult these notebooks at the Abbaye d’Ardenne ; Alice Déon, of the éditions de la Table Ronde, also granted me the possibility of republishing the text extracts already published in the Carnets of 2018.
5 April 1978
… for someone who is possibly terminal i feel rather marvelous.
October 1978
my hair slowly disappears… i go slowly mad observing my nude than ever prevalent scalp. and nude forehead how i deplore not having hair
_
i must not despair not having hair but hélas I do.
25 November 1978
in bed
ate laitu & nuts and feel so depressed. vanity makes losing my hair a disaster. i must find a solution. a wig? shave it all off? suicide? what?
8 December 1978
Voilà the beginning of a new book. i hope to keep this one neat. clean and no recording of vomit days. whether to wig or not to wig poses a rather silly problem. my vanity and image needs tell me to do something my alter ego tells me i am confident and strong enough to face the no hair problem like a man. […] will it mean fewer compliments and invitations ? we shall see ; shall be an interested spectator at my proper demise.
9 December 1978
projects:
wig hunting
the wing hunt not
the witch hunt
7 February 1979
dear God… please give me LUCK. i want to live 120 years. if the first 60 are unbelievably difficult please let the last 60 be luxuriant, successful incredibly fruitful.
9 February 1979
very little hair
but lots of hutzpah
16 February 1979
i am in love with my paris life difficult as it is parfois: i will it to continue 70 more years. then i can die leave this earth but not really. eternal life would suit me best.
18 April 1979
i grieve my many inadequacies: i’m not a success at anything except breathing, sitting still, thinking, imagining, hot talking, not living.
21 April 1979
if i think about it my life is a nightmare. if i don’t think and just play at it all, i can get through tant bien que mal! i’m wonderful! if i keep telling myself that i’m wonderful (and i am i really am) then everything is O.K.
24 April 1979
i’ve been playing “Heroine” for AGES
i created a monster and the monster devours the real ‘‘me’’ ?
i am my own ‘‘piece du theatre’’ and i want to live to be 120 years old just to see how ‘‘she’’ ends.
[…]
one can live to be 120 years old with proper diet and oodles of luck…
May 1979
my greatest talent is life. feeling ecstasy just breathing in and out. […] have lived many years but each day i rise up as a newborn baby… each and every day in itself is a lifetime the way i live it. So i don’t fear dying. i’ve lived thousand of day-lifetimes. oh to be reincarnated into one trilling super-canary after another! i am an opera lover but bird songs still thrill me more than human-song.
[…]
i feel strange and funny about being alive ever since i was told i had cancer and didnt die from it.
May 1979
She sign[ed] it but refused to write Good Luck with i told her i needed it because i have cancer.
[…]
Andy placed my hand on his corseted bullet riddled anatomy. it gave me a thrill which I feel to this day.
May 1979
i gotta lotta
mulatta
in me.
i said to the cancer
i said
there ain’t room for the two of us in my body. so scram.
May 1979
i have no secrets
when i was dying of cancer a year ago i came out every day and told everybody who asked my why i lost so much weight i told them everything: i know that I am well again. they are happy for me, some of them any way. they people my loneliness – their presence in my life is necessary. but I don’t care to be familier with anyone in fact this is the charm of café life no commitment except to be there.
7 June 1979
no more painting
no more ‘‘trying’’
juste live
13 June 1979
… i sit and wait gathering energy vibes for the next venture.
… i formulate ideas in my head for staying healthy
… i implore Lady L[u]ck to be at my side for the next seventy years.
25 June 1979
… i love my life yet it all sounds so sad on paper. why is this?
3 July 1979
I lost my hair but not my chutzpah…
10 July 1979
i am lucid, i am sad, i am strong, i am helpless, i am helpful to some, i am on vacation from myself..
i am a survivor… there is no joy.. there is just survival… it seems to be enough to keep me going and that is all. i don’t want to die, but i don’t really want to live either. Not the way others think of living.
i hang on for dear life.
to any tiny hope around…
sometimes i’m desperate…
sometimes i’m not. i actually feel i’m making progress.
11 August 1979
i am tired of every thing except living – or existing…
14 August 1979
i yam who i yam and who I yam is a wonderful thing to be.
21 August 1979
i am alive! i live i breathe i continue my habits.
22 August 1979
i have fluids thus a return to chemo hélas. […] at least i am alive
modus operandi
keep my cool.
it could be worse.
25 August 1979
oh God give me another chance to be well. Please Luck come back… i was hopefully smart ASS and lost the gamble talking myself into believing i was ‘cured’. oh how I am punished. its more than i can bear this time.
27 August 1979
if only the chemicals & piqures would work… but isn’t that wishful thinking?
i sit like a statue all that moves is my hand. i wait for better day or death or both.
30 August 1979
Dear God… give me the courage to face this newest discomfort. amen.
1st September 1979
oh I wish I could live and love as through nothing had happened. that no cancer had ever invaded my privates, its hard to believe i have it.
2 September 1979
Life is a nightmare that has to be lived. otherwise you’ll never know if it turns into a sweet dream after all.
4 September 1979
i suffer terribly the humiliation the discomfort of my condition. God help me please. i suffer morally i suffer physically i am mentally suicidal. cannot bear the distortion of my body nor its agony. Life is a nightmare which has to be lived until death is an accepted fact. […] i must not die as long as Sardi is alive…
5 September 1979
why should i die when i want to live?
[…]
Death death death… tries to depress me. with its menacing vibrations
6 September 1979
profit from each day in spite of my fatal physical condition
so much in life is psychological.
7 September 1979
help me win; please dear God i must live to be one hundred and twenty years olf. no more. no less.
8 September 1979
Fighting the desire to die because one experiences constant pain. […] yet i love life apart from the physical pain. can i balance it out? using reason weighing the pain against the rest which is much more positive: the weather the birds, the visual beauty of gardens and certain humans on thus far
9 September 1979
i wish to be buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. i want to haunt the neighborhood for hundreds of years hence… maybe thousands. i am too poor to offer myself such a luxury but perhaps somebody else will…
2 October 1979
Now i wont die… now that people want me to
Expect me to.
Now i want, i wont die.
7 October 1979
i am so happy to be alive at this moment… sitting peacefully with my dog in my favorite café. i expect nobody or anybody to enter and surprise me with their wit and charm and generosity.
15 October 1979
How lucky i am to be me cancer condition and all. […] i invent my life as i go along. lately i must have been morbidly bored and perhaps i invented a cancer to add drama to my poor little artists life?
20 October 1979
some people watch me as i write. that’s o.k. how i love life. how i don’t want to leave it till i’m a hundred and twenty years old. how good i feel just sitting and writing and nothing hurts for the moment.
28 October 1979
i’ve no ambition to do anything except the minimum to stay alive. walk, keep reasonably clean eat enough to stay alive… an ‘esquisse de la vie’
15 November 1979
modus operandi.
Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb.
19 November 1979
what i have learned about life? that i can do little about it except live it. submit to gods will… certainly. i died everything except work (paint) today
21 November 1979
DEARES[T] GOD i HOPE & PRAY that the fluids wont come back today (or any day there after)
[…]
Shirley Goldfarb
like Rome
was not built in a day.
26 November 1979
Life is not worth living unless i paint!
27 November 1979
What is left for me in life? to note the good days or the bad days. […] i sit sipping vichy water while people around me eat steaks drink wine smoke cigars. they are healthy indulging in all the food and drink habits considered unhealthy i eat or drink noth… and am dying (2) but not yet dead of cancer. it makes no sense. nothing does. why should it?
21 December 1979
i go into ectasy at the sight of a beautiful tree…
i shall live
just to see
again and again
that beautiful tree.
(outside the café Flore left window back)
thank you God for another day in which to paint and sing and stray.
i watch the people who populate the sad café… it is reassuring that they and i exist.
no matter what i do is interesting just because its me doing it.
22 December 1979
the cancer is my Auschwitz
ascite, nausea, perfusion, needles ponctions, delire anguish… la, voila.
31 December 1979
modus operandi for 1980
the show must go on all of them
10 April 1980
the second flacon of blood goes into my veins. i write and draw dots to occupy myself
17 May 1980
Cancer…
a game of chess to the death
20 May 1980
to be or not to be is no longer the question…
me… i be.
27 May 1980
modus operandi for Monday… Live… be painless
get out early…. paint
Love life, enjoy everything possible. […]
the longer i live… the more i want to forget… that which i know end that which i knew
6 June 1980
I slap Death down in its blistered cankered contenance…. it loses pus as i kick hard in its blue balled pelvic area. Death is a billiard bulled pot bellied beer drinking red necked son of a bitch and i beat him back as he tried to smash a beer bottle into my fragile baling chemio-therapist angel head. You cant have me ass-hole. not now or for 65 years or 30. Get lost… I’m the boss.
15 June 1980
Dear God… give me a miracle… remission from this cursed cancer till I am 120
18 June 1980
i will be Shirley Goldfarb right to the end of my one hundred and twenty years.
28 July 1980
i am determined
to rid myself of this
ascite and forever
2 August 1980
this… today… is a happy… truly happy moment in my life.
Long live my Life!
19 August 1980
my ascitis tightens on my tortured stomach. will i ever be ‘normal’. ever again. must this condition plague me with little respite for the remainder of my life which i will make every effort to be a total of one hundred and twenty years. will the exuberant healthy me win over the me of the alarming ascites? i need much luck.
24 August 1980
cancer is the nazi in my body…
4 September 1980
je ne suis pas ‘bien portant’. my only revenge is living if not as well as I should… just living.
14 September 1980
dear God please take away the pain (All of it) and the ascite. Please
[…]
i feel so awful since the last ‘‘treatment’’, i really prefer to die than to have another.
15 September 1980
i am so weak so defeated today. i cant make it. i must finally admit it to myself. i cant make it. it’s the first time i haven’t lied to me. no Shirley death is around the korner. the flies are picking at my cadaver already.
18 September 1980
i must will all this nightmare away and wake up to who i was before the trauma and become the magnificence i am destined to be… miracle miracle miracle
19 September 1980
Shall i bequeath my body to cancer research? it might be a more valuable cadeau than money.
21 September 1980
my decision of no more treatment pleases me. it suits my temperament. How i love life looking at people dialoguing painting. illness good health what contrasts. […] i cannot face another needle. i shall pray for a peaceful painless end. i am sick of eating & vomiting: I don’t want anymore. except natural life. […] but the world is a crap world. there is no more desire to stay alive to ‘see’ what happens.
i’m fed up.
23 September 1980
Why did my good luck leave me? oh please God bring it back! Don’t forsake me. we must reverse the destructive process. we must! […] where is my miracle? Some people never have to sit around writing notes to themselves. they are lucky enough to be surrounded by friends. why do my guts ache and why the blow up? oh let me wake up from this ever growing cauchemar.
[…]
What have i done wrong. everything? i do not accept the death sentence.
∗
Shirley Goldfarb dies on 28 September 1980, after cruel weeks, between solitude, discomfort, agitation and physical pain. Her last written words, which accompany the indication of 25 September « 9h : Curie – punction », are the following : « i am shocked and numb for the hallucination of my deteriorated state. A series of setbacks, ». Concluding without concluding, with a comma, like an escape in the midst of chaos.
1 We borrow the majority of the biographical details mentioned here from the very detailed master’s dissertation of Lilou Miné, Shirley Goldfarb. Artiste peintre et pique-assiette professionnelle, master’s dissertation (under the supervision of Mica Gherghescu and Didier Schulmann), Paris, École du Louvre, 2024, as well as from email exchanges with Marc Masurovsky in October 2026.
2 Shirley Goldfarb, Carnets : Montparnasse 1971-1980, Paris, éd. Quai Voltaire, 1994. A theatrical adaptation, drawn from this publication, was staged in 2000 by Caroline Loeb.
3 Shirley Goldfarb, Carnets : Montparnasse 1971-1980, Paris, éd. De la Table ronde, 2018.
4 3 August 1971. Carnet 1971 (digitised, online).
5 16 July 1979. GDF 4.6 June-July 1979.
6 27 July 1971. Carnet 1971 (digitised, online).
7 Id.
8 28 July 1971. Carnet 1971 (digitised, online).
9 6 August 1971. Carnet 1971 (digitised, online).
10 18 July 1979. GDF 4.6 June-July 1979.
11 Email exchanges with Marc Masurovsky, October 2026.
12 List of the notebooks consulted for this selection : Carnet January 1973 and April 1978 (digitised, online) ; Carnet GDF 4.1 (12 October – 7 December 1978) ; Carnet GDF 4.2 (8 December 1978 – 19 January 1979) ; GDF 5.1 (undated, « Paris is a woman… », 1979) ; Carnet GDF 4.5 (13 April 1979 – 10 June 1979) ; Carnet GDF 4.6 (June-July 1979) ; Carnet GDF 4.7 (21 July – 1st September 1979) ; Carnet GDF 4.8 (2 September 1979 – 4 October 1979) ; Carnet GDF 4.9 (5 October 1979 – 24 November 1979) ; Carnet GDF 4.10 (27 November 1979 – 13 January 1980) ; Carnet GDF 4.12 (14 March – 10 May 1980) ; Carnet GDF 4.13 (11 May – 21 July 1980) ; Carnet GDF 4.14 (22 July – 11 September 1980) ; Carnet GDF 4.15 (11 – 26 September 1980).
13 In the Jewish tradition, the age of 120 years – at which Moses is supposed to have died according to Deuteronomy – is considered an ideal age to die. The expression « May you live to 120 years » is a classic to wish people on their birthday.
14 The hutzpah (also spelled chutzpah, see the extract of 3 July 1979) is a word derived from Hebrew, which can be translated as « audacity », « nerve » or « impertinence ».
15 Shirley Goldfarb evokes here the signing of an autobiographical work by Lauren Bacall.
16 The artist refers here to Andy Warhol, regularly encountered in Paris, who had worn since the assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas in June 1968 a metal corset.
17 Shirley Goldfarb was indeed buried in the Montparnasse cemetery, joined in 2009 by her husband Gregory Masurovsky.
18 Drawings of trees occupy an important place in the notebooks of Shirley Goldfarb : as early as 1971, she explains that she must draw a tree a day to feel better.