ABOUT MARY ABBOTT
Mary Abbott, who was at the heart of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York in the 1940s and ’50s but, like other women painting in that genre, received far less recognition than her male counterparts, died on Aug. 23 in Southampton, N.Y. She was 98.
Thomas McCormick of the McCormick Gallery in Chicago, which represented her, announced the death.
Ms. Abbott painted bold, colorful works, often inspired by nature or music, and traveled in the same circles as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other artists who were redefining painting in the years after World War II. De Kooning in particular, 17 years her senior, became a friend, lover and protector, including from some of the other male artists.
“I didn’t like Pollock much,” Ms. Abbott related in an interview for the biography “de Kooning: An American Master,” by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (2004). “When he was sober he didn’t talk, and when he was drunk Bill had to keep pulling him off of me.”
That vivid description conveys what women trying to make a name for themselves in that world were facing.
“Mary Abbott was an early participant in the development of Abstract Expressionism,” said Gwen Chanzit, curator of the 2016 Denver Art Museum exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” which included works by Ms. Abbott, “but like other women painters, she was mostly left out of historical accounts of this male-dominated movement. Only now are the women of Abstract Expressionism beginning to be recognized for their contributions.”
Unlike some of her contemporaries — among them Lee Krasner (1908-84), Pollock’s wife, and Jay DeFeo (1929-89) — Ms. Abbott lived to see a resurgence of interest in the work of female Abstract Expressionists.
“To see this and other early works by Ms. Abbott together is a treat,” Benjamin Genocchio, reviewing a 2008 show at the Spanierman Gallery in East Hampton, N.Y., featuring several of her paintings, wrote in The New York Times, “for most come from private collections and have rarely been publicly shown. Few of her works are on permanent display in New York-area museums. That is a shame, for she is one of the last great Abstract Expressionist painters of her generation.”
Mary Lee Abbott was born on July 27, 1921, in New York City, and for her first two decades seemed headed for an entirely different sort of life. Her father, Henry, was a Navy captain and recipient of the Navy Cross, and her mother, Elizabeth, a poet and syndicated columnist, was a member of the socially prominent Grinnell family. Ms. Abbott was first singled out in The Times and other newspapers not as an artist but as a debutante, her high-society activities documented in painstaking detail.
SOURCE: New York Times
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
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