32 Facts About Betty Parsons

Betty Parsons is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde.

Betty Parsons came from a wealthy New York family that divided its time between New York City, Newport, Palm Beach, and Paris.

At the age of ten, Betty Parsons was enrolled in Miss Chapin's school for girls in New York.

Betty Parsons remained at the Chapin School for five years but was a mediocre student who was easily bored.

In 1913, Betty Parsons visited the Armory show, the International Exhibition of Modern Art.

In 1919, Betty Parsons married Schuyler Livingston Betty Parsons, an affluent, New York City socialite ten years her senior.

Betty Parsons's family hoped that Parsons would settle down into a conventional lifestyle, but the couple divorced in Paris, only three years later on the grounds of incompatibility, and as a result, her family disinherited her.

Betty Parsons remained in Paris and enrolled in the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, where she studied under the sculptors Emile-Antoine Bourdelle and Ossip Zadkine.

Betty Parsons bought a small house in Montparnasse where she lived with a British art student, Adge Baker, with whom she had a romantic relationship.

In 1933, after losing her alimony support in the Great Depression, Betty Parsons returned to America.

Betty Parsons first traveled to Santa Barbara, California, where she taught sculpture classes for a short time.

Betty Parsons would have nine more one-woman shows at Midtown over the next twenty years.

That position was short-lived and, in the fall of 1937, Betty Parsons began working at the gallery of Mary Quinn Sullivan, a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1940, Betty Parsons left Sullivan's gallery and took a position managing a contemporary gallery in the Wakefield Bookshop at 64 East 55th Street.

Betty Parsons was representing many contemporary artists, including Saul Steinberg, Adolph Gottlieb, Alfonso Ossorio, Hedda Sterne, Theodoros Stamos, and Joseph Cornell.

In September 1944, after four years at the Wakefield Gallery, Betty Parsons was invited to start and manage a contemporary art division in the gallery of art dealer Mortimer Brandt.

When Brandt moved to England after the war, Betty Parsons subleased the space from him and opened her own gallery at the urging of her artists.

The Betty Parsons Gallery opened in 1946 at 15 East 57th Street in Manhattan.

At a time when the market for avant-garde American art was minuscule, Betty Parsons was the only dealer willing to represent artists like Jackson Pollock after Peggy Guggenheim closed her Art of This Century gallery and returned to Europe in 1947.

Betty Parsons showed work by William Congdon, Clyfford Still, Theodoros Stamos, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, Forrest Bess, Michael Loew, Lyman Kipp, Judith Godwin, and Sari Dienes, among others.

Later in the 1950s, Smith and Newman helped to remodel Betty Parsons' gallery, creating an almost cube-shaped main space framed by white walls with subtly curved corners and a concrete floor whose proportions fitted their ordered works.

Betty Parsons had struggled so long to get them established, and other dealers capitalized on her efforts.

Betty Parsons later moved on to a younger generation of American artists, including Mino Argento, Jose Bernal, Ib Benoh, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Richard Pousette-Dart, Jeanne Reynal, Walter Tandy Murch, Leon Polk Smith, Richard Tuttle, Robert Yasuda, Jack Youngerman, and Oliver Steindecker among others.

Betty Parsons ran the gallery until her death in 1982, after which it was taken over by her former gallery assistant Jack Tilton who then transformed it into his own establishment.

Betty Parsons nurtured the artists who assisted her and they were encouraged to show at her gallery.

Betty Parsons was a painter, but her great love was sculpture, which she couldn't afford.

In 1959, Tony Smith designed her waterfront house-studio on the North Fork of the east end of Long Island, New York, perched on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound, where Betty Parsons worked on her art in her time off from the gallery.

Betty Parsons's painting style changed in 1947, turning from small landscapes and portraits into a bold, subjective abstraction when she began to make constructions from bits of wood and other materials that washed up on the beach near her home; most often her constructions reflected the area around her North Fork home, but sometimes the pieces reflected her travels to the Caribbean and abroad.

Betty Parsons's work has been exhibited at a number of other galleries, including the Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York; Spanierman Gallery, New York; and Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, Florida.

Betty Parsons is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, New York, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Parsons' work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Her personal papers and those from the Betty Parsons Gallery are held at the Archives of American Art.

Betty Parsons's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.