Betty Parsons, who died in 1982 at the age of 82, was one of the most recognizable figures in the art world of the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. As a gallery owner in New York City, she promoted young American artists, among them several of the abstract expressionists; her stable included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and Richard Pousette-Dart.
But Ms. Parsons was also a painter in her own right, mostly of abstract works in the vein of the artists she admired and showed in her gallery. She frequently painted at her weekend home in Southold, which is one of the reasons the Spanierman Gallery in East Hampton is staging a long-overdue retrospective. The other is that her work really deserves to be better known.
Ms. Parsons was classically trained in Paris; she initially wanted to be a sculptor, but then switched to realist painting. She did not have much of a feel for that kind of thing, which is made clear by a pair of early watercolors — one of boats on the water, the other a portrait of her favorite Scottish terrier. But what these early paintings reveal is a highly unusual color sense, which also characterizes much of her later, more abstract work.
Ms. Parsons’s colors take a bit of getting used to. She liked lime green, pink, brown and various shades of orange; at least, those are the colors that recur in the more than 40 paintings selected for this exhibition by the curator and critic Ronny Cohen. Ms. Parsons seems to have worked intuitively, inspired in her color choices by a feeling about some aspect or element of nature. She was a born sensualist.
Her best paintings have a tremendous energy, as if the artist, sure of what she wanted, sat down and let the imagery flow. Her brushwork, never hesitant or stiff, is always dashing, vigorous and decisive. She also liked to use the pointed tip of her brush to incise squiggly lines in the paint. You get the feeling that she took great pleasure in painting.
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