Betty Parsons on the Beach at Southold, Long Island, photograph, Parsons Estate

Lisa N. Peters

While working on our third exhibition of the art of Betty Parsons (1900-1982), opening February 9, I was once again amazed by Parsons.   She seems to have lived several lives at once and didn’t compromise on any of them.  Her New York gallery is viewed today as the most important and groundbreaking of the Abstract Expressionist era.  She championed the artists she showed, both famous (Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko) and little known, with relentless energy and passion.  Friendship was important to her, and she kept close contact with her inner circle of friends; her work as a dealer was integral with her social life.  In addition to the artists she exhibited, her friendships included a surprising list of other well-known figures in the arts, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham, Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, and even Greta Garbo (for whom she was at times mistaken).

Betty Parsons, travel journal, estate of the artist (click image to enlarge)

Despite her fame as a dealer, Parsons saw herself as first and foremost an artist.  From her teenage years onward, she created her own work, painting and sculpting, and constantly producing studies in pencil, watercolor, and marker.  For our exhibition, we were able to borrow several of the travel journals that Parsons kept from the 1950s until her death in 1982, in which she worked out her ideas and conveyed her impressions of the passing world.

Betty Parsons, travel journal, estate of the artist (click image to enlarge)

Accordingly the focus of our exhibition is on Parsons’s travels, which were such an important facet of her life, both personally and professionally.  She lived in Paris at the beginning of her career after she was able to extricate herself from a bad marriage.  On returning to America when her family’s income was lost due to the Depression, she settled in New York and went to work as a dealer, but the passion for travel never left her.  She ricocheted from place to place in America and Europe to visit friends and the artists she represented.

Betty Parsons, "Mexican Memories," ca. 1955

She also traveled for the sake of adventure, demonstrating a fortitude and fearlessness that even her younger, seemingly stronger companions could not muster.  Her nephew, Billy Rayner, who was often her traveling companion, contributed a recollection to the catalogue for our show, in which he recalls a time in the Yukon when a bear appeared out of the woods, sending everyone to their cabins, except Betty, who “whipped out her paints and rendered the beast in a glowing watercolor.”  Never discouraged by rough circumstances, Parsons traveled throughout the world with gusto and wonder.  She ventured to Asia, Africa, Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean.  Rayner notes that of the locales she frequented, Haiti, so recently devastated, was perhaps her favorite.  He writes : “During the day we would go to the great iron market in Port-au-Prince where we sketched the vendors and the ever-present Tonton Macoutes, with their reflective dark glasses, which hid their souls and their intimidating grimaces that marshaled fear.  A fear felt by all, but was not shared, by Betty.”  Betty’s art expresses the intrepid and expansive way she experienced the world.  That she was never bound by dogma facilitated both her incredible aptitude as a dealer and the creative freedom revealed in her work—she moved fluidly between the representational and the abstract, never concerned with where she stood in this continuum.

Betty Parsons, "To the Glory of Africa," 1972

In a way, travel was a metaphor for her life as she did not allow herself to become stuck, remaining constantly open to the diverse and unfamiliar, while understanding the universals beneath it all.  The scholar Lawrence Alloway wrote that Parsons’s art “rests on a basic assumption of art as life’s running companion.  A moment of life equals a painting.”  (Betty Parsons—Paintings, exh. cat. Bennington College, 1966).  Parsons’s  career, art, friendships, and travel were fully entwined, their points of convergence fueling a life of achievement, matched by few and especially by few woman during an era of masculine hegemony in the American art world.

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Also read From the Archives: Interview with Betty Parsons.