Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on February 9, 2010 of Journeys: The Art of Betty Parsons . Parsons's career as a legendary art dealer who represented many of the important avant-garde artists of the mid-twentieth century has often overshadowed a consideration of her own art. T his oversight has been remedied in the last decade and a half when several exhibitions and publications have been devoted to Parsons's oeuvre, revealing its originality and her distinctive artistic voice. Following shows held at the Pollock-Krasner House, East Hampton, New York (1992), the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York (1999), the Naples Museum of Art, Florida (2005), and Spanierman Modern (2008), the present exhibition focuses on a particular facet of Parsons's work, the relationship of her paintings and sculptures to her travels in America and abroad, which sustained and inspired her throughout her life, while echoing her personal journey as an individual and as an artist. The exhibition is accompanied by a forty-eight page catalogue (available for $30) with color illustrations of the twenty-seven works in the show, an essay by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., and recollections of "traveling with Betty" by her nephew William P. Rayner and her assistant Gwyn Metz, both of whom were Parsons's most frequent traveling companions. Included in the catalogue are also illustrations from Parsons's "travel journals," in which her visual notations reveal a cross-referencing between her experiences of the passing world and her completed work.

Born Elizabeth Bierne Pierson in 1900, Parsons had a life and career that epitomize the struggles and achievements of women as the twentieth century unfolded. She grew up surrounded by the affluence that had come from inheritances on both sides of her family, and she often visited Paris in her childhood. A visit to the landmark Armory Show of 1913 awakened her desire to become an artist, with which she proceeded by training under Gutzom Borglum and Mary Tonetti. After a brief marriage that ended in divorce in 1923, Parsons resided in Paris for ten years, a time that enabled her to continue to study art and travel throughout Europe. She spent many summers in Brittany and vacationed in Florence , where one of her tennis partners was Ezra Pound. Her Parisian milieu included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and the feminist poet Natalie Barney.

Returning to America in 1933 when the Great Depression severed her family's income, she spent a year in California, before returning to New York to support herself. Her first job was at the Midtown Galleries. She then was hired successively to run the gallery at the Wakefield Bookshop, the Sullivan Gallery ,

and the Brandt Gallery. In 1946 she opened her own gallery. This debut was well-timed, as Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery had just closed, and Parsons inherited her stable of artists, including Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Parsons also showed the art of Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Saul Steinberg, Richard Tuttle, and many others.

In 1959 Parsons received an unexpected inheritance from an uncle, which enabled her to buy land in Southold, Long Island and build a house overlooking the sea, designed by the architect Tony Smith. This would be the home to which she would retreat in the years ahead, and from which she would set out to the beach to gather "carpenters' throwaways," the wood scraps from houses, boats, docks, and furniture that she would transform into sculptural constructions. The money she received also enabled her to travel even more than in the past. In the years that followed, she went to Africa and Mexico and took a trip across Asia, often covering a vast amount of territory in a short amount of time.

In her art Parsons explored contemporary concerns with color and space, the nature of the physicality of the art object, and the desire for a non-referential art of pure feeling, but she also drew freely from her life experiences, at times depicting specific places and at other times alluding more generally to a locale, expressing the emotions it evoked. Water, land, and sky have a presence in paintings that seem also maps of places as well as reflections of inner worlds. In Garden in Saint Denis she evokes movement along winding passageways and around shrubbery, the blending of formal and more abundant nature matching the energy of the work in which structure is pressured by an explosive spontaneity. Mexico, a place Parsons traveled to often, is recalled in the lively Mexican Memories , in which terra-cotta shapes and scattered blue shards evoke animated Pre-Columbian sculptures and petroglyphs. To the Glory of Africa and African Dawn reveal the brilliant colors that Parsons began to use after traveling to Africa in 1972. In No Squares her use of a vivid royal blue evokes this color in the French flag, which Parsons had depicted in many of her early drawings of Brittany , suggesting the way that her journeys remained part of her consciousness over the decades.

The theme of travel is also present in Parsons's sculptures. She was compelled by the traces of past human use that were revealed in the wood scraps that she picked up on the beach, bearing within them former lives and passages through time. She stated: "They tossed in the sea for I don't know how long . . . and then they washed ashore, broken and changed." Keeping the pieces intact, Parsons combined them, adding to their associative qualities. Often, as in Yield , the sculptures suggest a choice of movement and direction, conveying the many routes in life and travel. In Untitled (#36) the horizontal base and sail-like shapes give the work a nautical quality.

While encompassing her literal travels, Parsons's art also expresses the nature of her broader journey as an artist, in which she was alert to the innovations in the New York art world, while remaining true to her own passions. She expressed her amazement at the natural world in the lyrical Autumn and in Green #1 , which evokes an aerial view over the sea. She conveyed her enthusiasm for the Native American art in works such as Indian Writhing , recalling that the show at her gallery in 1946 was probably the first to connect this indigenous work with currents in contemporary art. She was enthralled by the cosmos, as evidenced in Sputnik , named for the Russian robotic spacecraft that orbited the earth. One painting in the exhibition is simply entitled Journey , the emerging and receding shapes symbolically expressing Parsons's sense of her life and art as an ongoing process of discovery, recollection, and reinvention.

You might enjoy these blog posts on Parsons:
- Betty Parsons: Travels, Both Literal and Metaphorical
- Betty Parsons in Maine