Betty Parsons

Betty Parsons ( born January 31, 1900 as Betty Bierne Pierson, † July 23, 1982 in New York City ) was a New York artist and gallerist, which was named for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionists as the "mother of Abstract Expressionism ". It took the artist Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt.

Life

The daughter of a wealthy family, she studied painting in Paris. She enrolled in the " Académie de la Grande Chaumiere " and had Antoine Bourdelle, Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine as a teacher. One of her classmates was Alberto Giacometti. The circle of friends included Man Ray and Alexander Calder.

Having lost in the "Great Depression" her money, she returned in 1933 to the USA and worked for a time as an art teacher in California, 1935, she went to New York, where the " Midtown Galleries " showed an exhibition of her paintings.

Betty Parsons Gallery

She worked as an employee and director of various galleries ( Midtown, Sullivan, Wakefield Bookshop, Mortimer Brandt ) before 1946 in the 57th Street in Manhattan her own gallery with the help of four supporters who contributed $ 1,000 each, opened. After Peggy Guggenheim had closed their Gallery Gallery " Art of This Century " in 1947 because of her return to Europe, she took over the abstract expressionists. Due to their close connections to the intellectual New York art scene ( gallery owners, art critics, curators ) the positions taken by their painters were given a platform, brought in to them recognition and first fame. When her but Rothko, Newman, Pollock and Still 1951 the proposal made ​​that they should focus on their representation and marketing, she refused with the words: "I love a larger garden " ( " I like a bigger garden" ). Gradually, the abstract expressionists then left her gallery and entered into agreements with more market-oriented galleries like the Sidney Janis and Sam Kootz.

After that, she still has many contemporary artists in her gallery - offered her first solo exhibitions in New York - among them Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle and Ellsworth Kelly. The gallery was closed in 1982.