Mary Abbott American, 1921-2019

Mary Abbott (1921–2019) was among the last artists to have witnessed the emergence of Abstract Expressionism firsthand, and one of the few women admitted to The Club, the artists’ group that helped shape the movement, alongside Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell. Her painting is driven by color and gesture, drawing above all on the natural world and transformed by the intense light of Saint Croix and Haiti. “I like the process of painting,” she said. “The intensity of living nature through myself, using the medium, paint, color and line defining the poetry of living space, that is my aim, life and work.”

Born in New York into a family with a distinguished public profile, Abbott was the daughter of a naval commander who served in Roosevelt’s war cabinet and a poet and syndicated columnist. She grew up between New York, Washington, Concord, and Southampton. Her aunt, Mary Ogden Abbott, was a sculptor. As a child, Abbott wanted to become both a herpetologist and an artist. She studied with Eugene Weiss at the Corcoran School in Washington, then at the Art Students League in New York with George Grosz and Morris Kantor.

David Hare introduced Abbott to André Breton and the Surrealists who had sought refuge in New York. At the end of the 1940s, she joined Subjects of the Artist, the unorthodox school founded by Hare with William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. The experience proved decisive. She worked alongside Rothko and Newman, formed a lifelong friendship with Willem de Kooning, and became part of the downtown circle that gathered at the Cedar Tavern, among them Jackson Pollock, Grace Hartigan, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery.

Abbott’s work was first exhibited in New York in Fifteen Unknowns at Kootz Gallery in 1950. The following year, she participated in the Ninth Street Show, the landmark exhibition that announced the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. She went on to exhibit in the Stable Gallery annuals of 1954, 1955, and 1957, developing an expansive, all-over approach through oil, charcoal, and oil stick. In 1959, she and the poet Barbara Guest collaborated on a series of word pictures: Guest would speak a word, and Abbott would answer it in paint, translating language into gesture and color.

Extended stays in Haiti and Saint Croix throughout the 1950s, followed by time in Southampton, profoundly shaped Abbott’s palette. Her paintings became increasingly open, luminous, and saturated with color, conveying the heat and vitality of a place rather than its literal appearance. She taught at the University of Minnesota through the 1970s before returning to Southampton, where she worked in a studio in a disused icehouse and continued painting into her nineties.

Abbott’s place in the history of Abstract Expressionism has received renewed attention as the contributions of women associated with the New York School have been reassessed. A significant milestone was Women of Abstract Expressionism, presented at the Denver Art Museum in 2016, the first museum exhibition devoted to the women artists of the movement.