Shirley Goldfarb was an American painter best known for her monumental Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s and 1960s and her gridded palette knife paintings of the 1970s and 1980s. She studied art at the Art Students League in New York from 1949, where she attended the famous Cedar Bar and was friends with Jackson Pollock. In 1954, she moved to Paris with her husband Gregory Masurovsky as part of the GI programme. Here she came into her own as an artist. She blended the painterly action of Abstract Expressionism with a sense of light and color that she owed to her adopted hometown. Her works can be found in a number of important public collections, including the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, the Kunsthalle, Bale, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., the Georges Pompidou Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.