When I recently read about Jackson Pollock’s “Number 7A, 1948,” a long scroll of looping lines that brought $181 million at auction, I thought of Betty Parsons and the difficulty she had selling his work. She opened her gallery in 1946 in a single, windowless room on the fifth floor of 15 East 57th Street. From this humble perch, she provided the world with its first glimpse not only of “Number 7A, 1948,” but also of Mark Rothko’s fuzzy blurs of color, Barnett Newman’s room-size red canvases and various other hard-to-sell paintings later hailed as the canonical masterworks of postwar art.
If Parsons helped introduce “the great big shots,” as she called them, she also endured the disappointment of seeing them leave her gallery for dealers who promised to capitalize on the brand-new market for American art. (Market? That is where Parsons bought her tomatoes.) She continued to run her gallery and discover new artists until her death at 82, in 1982.
One artist who failed to merit wall space at the gallery was Parsons, an accomplished painter and sculptor. It would have been “too embarrassing” to give herself a show, she said. The good news is that Amy Sillman, the esteemed abstract painter, and Kelly Taxter, an independent curator, have staged an intervention, organizing “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World,” an enlightening and overdue retrospective at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
