Some say there were just two rules governing the Club, a group of leading Abstract Expressionists in mid-century New York City. One was technical: Any two founding members could block a new applicant from joining. The other was more broadly exclusionary: “No women, communists or homosexuals.”
Whether that second rule was enforced is the matter of some doubt. Communism was never discussed at meetings, but secret sympathies were difficult to sniff out. John Cage, the avant-garde composer, was a member of the Club while he maintained a long-term creative and romantic relationship with choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham. And, of course, a few of the Club’s earliest members were women, including Perle Fine, Mercedes Matter and Elaine de Kooning.
Even so, famous male artists—such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock—dominate the legacy of Abstract Expressionism.
One of the few women invited to the Club was Mary Abbott, an artist who pushed the boundaries of the Abstract Expressionist movement. She worked alongside painters like Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman for decades but rarely received similar levels of praise or recognition.
“Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination,” an exhibition on view at the Schoelkopf Gallery in New York City, seeks to change that. It’s the first major survey exhibition of Abbott’s entire career, which stretched from the 1940s to the early 2000s.
“It’s taken years for the establishment to embrace her contributions,” Alana Ricca, the gallery’s managing director, tells Cultured magazine’s Stephanie Wong. “We are now in a very rich moment of reconsideration for artists that hadn’t achieved the same level of critical acclaim as certain of their peers.”
Born in 1921, Abbott was a blue-blooded New Yorker who attended the finest all-girls schools in Manhattan and traced her family lineage back to two presidents (John Adams and John Quincy Adams). She took up painting at the age of 12, progressing at the Art Students League of New York until she reached advanced classes taught by the German artist George Grosz.
She soon left his tutelage in favor of David Hare, a neighbor and one of the founders, alongside Rothko and others, of the experimental Subjects of the Artist school. After moving to a flat in the East Village, Abbott worked and socialized with an avant-garde milieu, including the de Koonings and Pollock.
She began experimenting with materials and media, using pastel, oil paint, charcoal and collage combined with hand and paw prints from her dogs, according to a gallery guide. Process, for Abbott, was as important as the finished painting, which might go some way in explaining why most of the more than 60 paintings featured in the exhibition are Untitled.
“My paintings happen through a journey: dancing, seeing, waiting; destroying, discovering, doubting, guessing, finishing and reopening,” Abbott was quoted as saying in Marika Herskovic’s 2003 book American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, per the gallery guide. “I like the process of painting.”
Some of the earliest works in the show date to the era of her first exhibition, titled “Fifteen Unknowns,” which opened at New York’s Kootz Gallery in 1950. The following year, she was featured in the “9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture,” widely considered the formal debut of Abstract Expressionism.
Her work from the time is colorful and bold. It conveys painting as an action, with clear indications of the direction and pace of her brushstrokes and oil pastel scrawls.
Recognizable objects are rare in her work, although two self-portraits serve as fitting “bookends” for the show, per Artnet’s Annikka Olsen. The first, from 1941, shows the artist, a former model for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, with blond hair and tight red lips, which are mirrored by abstract golden-brown coils and red highlights around her blue top and the blue background.
The second, painted sometime in the 1980s, is much more abstract. The few recognizable features of a human face—blue eyes, nostrils, those same red lips—appear refracted through a vase of flowers. The rest melts into pure color and form.
“Mythology and religion were touchstones, but nature was Abbott’s lifelong interest,” Gwen Chanzit, curator of the 2016 exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism” at the Denver Art Museum, told the New York Times’ Neil Genzlinger for Abbott’s obituary in 2019. “Her free brushwork was particularly inspired by place and by the variations of color and light in the natural world. Her paintings were never documents of specific sites, but her personal responses to them.”
Shows like “Women of Abstract Expressionism” have helped push the art world to recognize Abbott’s contributions to the movement and beyond. But much work remains in pulling her legacy into the mainstream.
“It’s surprising to know that she hasn’t had this big retrospective, or this big exhibition entirely devoted to her work yet,” Ricca tells Artnet. “But we’re working to correct that, and we hope that this will be the first of many.”
“Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination” is on view at the Schoelkopf Gallery in New York City through June 28, 2025.
