The Divine Dozen: Mary Abbott – Poetry of Space

Energy has many moods. It can be soft and languid, quiet and reflective—or, as in the work of abstract expressionist Mary Abbott, it can be explosive and bold.

Oisin’s Dream, Mary Abbott, 1925

Mary Abbott in her studio.

Scientists tell us that energy never disappears, but morphs into other forms as fire turns to ash and rises into the air to become part of the precious air we breathe. When an artist contributes as much as 95-year-old* Mary Abbott has over her lifetime, she marks the art world indelibly.

Abbott’s style is quintessentially abstract and bubbles up from the deep well of her gift for translating sensations into art. She sums up her approach in Mary Abbott: Works from the 1950s by Thomas McCormick:

“I like the process of painting. 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.”

When Gwen Chanzit, Curator of Modern Art at the Denver Art Museum began the complicated process of deciding which women would be featured in Women of Abstract Expressionism in 2016, she surveyed more than one hundred artists. It is not surprising that Mary Abbott was one of the dozen chosen to represent the influences and strong presence of women painters working in this genre.

Abbott was born in Boston in 1921, child of a long-line of prominent American notables, such as John Adams, second president of the United States, and General Robert E. Lee, as well as the daughter of naval commander and military adviser Henry Abbott and his wife, Elizabeth Grinnell, a poet and writer.

All Green, Mary Abbott, 1954

By the age of 12, Mary was studying at the Art Students League of New York and, by the late 1930s, she was enrolled in their advance classes. It was a period when she became acquainted with the works of Cimabue, Tintoretto, Delacroix, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse—all would influence her developing style. She also studied with Eugene Weiss at the Corcoran Museum School in Washington, DC.

As a member of New York’s so-called “high society,” Abbott became a debutante in 1941 and then began working part-time as a model for Vogue and later other fashion publications, such as Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle. Following an early, short-lived first marriage, she moved into a cold-water flat on Tenth Street in Manhattan. Soon sculptor, photographer, and painter David Hare introduced her to the Subjects of the Artist School, cofounded by Hare, Barnet Newman, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and other male abstractionists. Abbott was one of the few women to attend the school and felt that Newman and Rothko “taught us to draw imagination.” Hare also introduced Abbott to peyote, hallucinogenic experiences that she says greatly influenced her use and understanding of color.

In the late 1940s, Abbott began an important professional and personal relationship with Willem de Kooning. In an essay by Asher Edelman in 2012, an art financier, dealer, and gallerist (Edelman Arts), Edelman emphasizes that it is Abbott who influenced de Kooning, rather than the other way around as is often thought:

Mary Abbott’s strong personal and professional relationship with de Kooning influenced his output to an astonishing degree. [She] had experimented with abstract landscapes from her Southampton home for nearly five years by the time de Kooning began his own landscape series. The creative exchange between the two artists continued through the following decade. As Abbott and de Kooning’s lives were intertwined, so too were their works, which seem to share subject, technique, and even color palette. This fundamental exchange of ideas has gone almost entirely unrecognized and provides new insights into the oeuvres of both Abbott and de Kooning. . . . Mary Abbott had [a profound] influence on the abstract expressionist movement and especially on her lover Willem de Kooning. . . . Capturing abstract landscapes even before de Kooning, [her] experimentation in abstract all-over composition achieved a rare level of expression, they pulse with an intimacy and vehemence which her older, male counterparts were only later able to attain. (quoted with permission)

Haiti, Mary Abbott, 1953

In 1950, Abbott settled in Southampton but continued to maintain a Manhattan studio and to hang out with painters, writers, and poets in such famous gathering places as the Cedar Street Tavern, a Greenwich Village dive bar. She also began to gain recognition for her innovative work, exhibiting at the Stable Gallery and other venues.

Wintering in the Virgin Islands and Haiti, she produced a series of large-scale painting that reverberate like a drum beat with the movement and sizzling colors of the tropics, its brilliant blue skies and piercing heat.

Through the decades, Abbott has continued to produce vibrant, gesture-filled paintings and drawings that reflect her exuberant responses to life and nature. She taught at the University of Minnesota from 1974 to 1977, where she dug deeper into her understanding of chromatics, the branch of colorimetry that deals with hue and saturation. She’s had many solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in the United States and abroad, including, in 2008, Significant Form: The Persistence of Abstraction, held at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Art Hampton Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor bestowed on artists who have made an important contribution to the visual arts. Examples of her work are found in many institutional collections, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, and in numerous private collections.

A post of this length cannot begin to do justice to Mary Abbott’s life story. From an early age she packed in all that the world offered. She was never a bystander, always a participant. She lived and loved freely and created impressive works that not only are among the best of abstract expressionism but remarkable symbols of an American artist’s passionate devotion to art.

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*Mary Abbott died in 2019 at the age of 99.

MORE: In 2010, WNYC’s Sara Fishko spoke to three postwar New York painters, including Mary Abbott. Listen to the audio here. A trailer for the Denver Art Museum show. Wonderful clips of many of the artists talking about their work.

Accompanying the Denver Art Museum exhibition is a stunning catalog, Women of Abstract Expressionism, filled with insightful essays and images. Social media request: I hope you’ll help spread the word about this series on the Divine Dozen. If you do, please use the hashtag #womenofabex