The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

Charlotte Park was a full participant in the advent of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, although her critical success later in the decade was largely eclipsed—along with that of Mary Abbott, Gertrude Greene, Lee Krasner, Perle Fine, and other female colleagues—by the more dramatic and widely celebrated work of the New York School’s male contingent. After graduating in 1939 from the Yale School of Art and serving in the Office of Strategic Services, in Washington, D.C., during World War II, Park taught children’s art classes in Manhattan private schools and, later, classes at the Museum of Modern Art. Although she started as a student of Cubism, by the 1950s she had developed a more lyrical idiom suggesting the organic contours of natural forms, coupled with abstract qualities of light and color. Park married the Abstract Expressionist painter James Brooks in 1949, and they set up painting studios in Montauk (much of their work there was destroyed by a hurricane in September 1956). In 1950, they established a home in Springs, East Hampton.
[Gregory Galligan]