Betty Parsons (1900-1982)

JOURNEYS: The Art of Betty Parsons
(Soft Cover) - $30 - ORDER

This catalog accompanies JOURNEYS: The Art of Betty Parsons. The 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. This forty-eight page catalogue includes 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.
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Read the blog post on Parsons travel journals - Betty Parsons: Travels, Both Literal and Metaphorical

TOTEM MATERIA
Sculpture and Paintings by Betty Parsons
(Soft Cover) - $15 - ORDER

This catalog accompanies TOTEM MATERIA: Sculpture and Paintings by Betty Parsons. As an art dealer and advocate of the leading avant-garde artists of the mid- and late twentieth century, Parsons (1900-1982) held a critical position in the American art world for over three decades. Yet the renown of her gallery, and her prescience in giving recognition to artists long before their work became accepted by others, has overshadowed an awareness of her own art. This situation 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. This exhibition provides a further opportunity to reveal a body of work that, while reflecting the radical currents that she championed, also demonstrates Parsons’s unique perspective, in which she often side-stepped the serious, theoretical outlook of the abstract art of her time to allow wit, personality, and direct inventiveness to guide her creative efforts. - ORDER

The Painted Sculpture of Betty Parsons
(Soft Cover) - $32 - ORDER

Published on the occasion of a 2005-2006 exhibition organized by Judith Goldman for the Naples Museum of Art, Florida, this 79-page book includes essays by Goldman, Richard Tuttle, and Paul Cummings, 35 full-page color plates, a checklist of the exhibition, a selected bibliography, and a list of Parsons’s solo exhibitions. The legendary art dealer who promoted three generations of American artists and helped launch the careers of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, Parsons was also an accomplished painter and sculptor. She decided to become a sculptor at the age of thirteen when she visited the Armory Show and went on to study sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle and Aleksandr Archipenko and drawing with Arshile Gorky and John Graham. The painted sculptures from weathered wood washed ashore by the sea that Parsons began to make in 1966 are the subject of this book. These have been described by the painter Cleve Gray as “tangible messages from an unyielding spirit.” This is the first book to focus exclusively on these works. - ORDER