The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

Periodically retiring to her East End home and studio in Southold, on Long Island’s bucolic North Fork, the Manhattan art collector and dealer Betty Parsons would quietly reconnect with her own creative projects. Few observers were fully cognizant of it at the time, but throughout her long career as a cultivator of giants among the first generation of the New York School and its extended legacy—she ran one of the most progressive midtown galleries for more than thirty-five years—Parsons was herself in frequent need of a regenerative wellspring. Indeed, in the late 1920s, long before she became New York’s foremost “keeper” of Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still at her eponymous gallery at 24 East Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, Parsons had studied in Paris under the sculptors Émile-Antoine Bourdelle (formerly an assistant to Auguste Rodin) and Ossip Zadkine. After a brief apprenticeship in various New York galleries, Parsons established her own exhibition venue in 1946. Historians cite how she virtually took up where Peggy Guggenheim had left off, the latter having recently closed her renowned Art of This Century gallery, which had opened in late 1942. Hardly a sales puppet, Parsons made her name primarily as a prescient “den mother” of Abstract Expressionism, taking in first-generation artists before they achieved stardom and, when they deserted her for more profitable horizons, moving to a younger generation of American masters-in-the-making, among them Perle Fine, Ellsworth Kelly, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Jack Youngerman. Because of her own artistic training and indefatigable perspicacity, Parsons functioned as an art historian of what might be termed the “real-time contemporary.” It was finally the environment of Long Island’s North Fork that catalyzed her own inventive sensibility. Combing the beachfront late in life near the cliffside studio that the sculptor Tony Smith had built her, Parsons made a practice of salvaging scraps of wood debris and combining the disjunctive and weathered fragments in small assemblages that conjure a long history of modernist transatlantic art-making: Cubism, Dada, International Constructivism, and Abstract Expressionism each implied in a given work’s seemingly improvised configuration. [Gregory Galligan]