In 1951 a group of artists represented by the legendary American art dealer Betty Parsons gave her an ultimatum. Either she had to drop her wider roster of artists and put all her efforts into boosting their careers or they would walk away. Among them were Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. In other words, the rising stars of abstract expressionism. Parsons’ response: “Sorry, I have to follow my own lights – no.”
Those lights led not only to the progressive gallery she’d opened in midtown Manhattan in 1946 – a launchpad for the New York avant garde – but to her own committed and experimental artistic practice. After spending the working week in the city nurturing other people’s careers, she would retreat at the weekend to her seaside studio in Southold, Long Island, where, over the course of 50 years, she produced hundreds of distinctive paintings and driftwood sculptures that she exhibited throughout her life. It’s fitting then that her first retrospective in Europe is displayed at De La Warr Pavilion on the Sussex coast. Spread across both floors of the concrete building, overlooking the sea, her art feels right at home.
The exhibition brings together works from the 1930s to the year before her death in 1982. Parsons knew early on that she wanted to be an artist, and, like many friends and colleagues, she felt the lure of Paris, where she lived and studied for a decade before returning to New York in 1933. In the years that followed she sketched her surroundings – fleeting landscapes influenced by the summer watercolour classes she’d attended in the south of France – before trading her watercolours for gouache, acrylic and oil, and dedicating herself to abstraction.
Abstract suggestions … Untitled, c. 1970. Photograph: Courtesy Alison Jacques, London and Alexander Grey Associates, New York
You can see the shift playing out in Bahamas (1950), a scorching painting on paper that’s bolder and brighter than the few softly rendered scenes preceding it, but still has a hint of figuration. Two bodies are on a beach, possibly reading. The sand is cobbled together with coarse strokes of pink and yellow; shades of blue suggest sea and sky. The bathers’ tomato-red outline could represent towels – or sunburn.
And that’s it for obvious figurative elements; the rest of the exhibition, organised chronologically, is deliciously abstract. Enriched by adventurous travels to Africa and the Caribbean, the palette is vivid, with patches of cerulean, fuchsia, orange, mint. Swinging between scales, some paintings are the size of a paperback, coaxing you towards them, while others have more in common with the vast canvases of those ascendant male artists back in the city. The result: both respect and intimacy.
Often they’re untitled, leaving you to indulge in swiftly daubed shapes, swatches of saturated colour, lines scribbled into still-wet paint with the end of a brush. Elsewhere, titles offer a hint of meaning: Eyes and Garden II (1956) features pink and blue splotches floating on a moss-green bed; Summer Fire (1959) is ablaze with pinkish red.
Horton’s Point (1968) evokes in strips of red, orange and blue the lighthouse built in Southold in 1857. In 1960, Parsons moved into a waterfront house-studio nearby, designed by the artist Tony Smith, and embarked on her most productive period. The influence of the shoreline shines through in Reef Life (1975), with its painterly suggestions of fish and other sea creatures wrapped in a sea-blue border, and Under Sea (1975), the darkness of the ocean floor lurking between wavy strips of seaweed.
Wonderfully weird wonky scraps … sculptural work from Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy. Photograph: Rob Harris/Courtesy Alison Jacques, London and Alexander Grey Associates, New York
Upstairs, physical spoils from the sea find form in the playful sculptural work Parsons began making in 1965. Fashioned from driftwood and other materials found on the beach, these statues are wonderfully weird; an archival photograph shows a group of them on the sand, as if they’ve just scuttled, crab-like, out of the waves. Up close, the wonky wood scraps, stacked and striped with pigment, are weathered; the nails used to piece them together jut out at jaunty angles. Some anchor you in Long Island or places she visited abroad; others vaguely resemble boats and buildings.
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A queer woman in a male-dominated art world, Parsons was one of the first gallerists in New York to represent women, queer artists and people of colour. She followed her intuition, showing new work that was far-out, and individuals who were diverse or overlooked. The same streak of originality runs through her art, from the offbeat paintings to the sculptures, fun and fresh. The bits she salvaged for her wooden constructions had either washed up on the beach in front of her light-filled studio or been chucked by local carpenters and architects.
Would that same group of artists – whom she dubbed “the giants” on account of the success coming their way – have liked her to set aside her own artistic practice as well as her diverse roster of clients to concentrate on selling their work? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Being an artist was a priority for Parsons, who once said in an interview, “When I’m painting in my studio … I forget the gallery entirely.”
Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy is at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea until 18 January
