“A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church,” critic Brian O’Doherty wrote in “Inside the White Cube,” a much-quoted 1976 essay that contests the neutrality of display mechanisms for modernist art. “The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light,” he continued. As happens when an unexpected diagnosis hits a vein of truth, over time his observation has come to seem so axiomatic as to be banal. But at the time of its writing, O’Doherty was also an artist—showing under his alter ego Patrick Ireland—who was represented by Betty Parsons, the renowned New York gallerist who in no small part created these laws. His essay comments on the very specific aesthetic vocabulary she implemented when she first opened her 57th Street space in 1946, which soon became the default industry-wide.
While Parsons’s name is known to those familiar with the emergence of first-generation New York School painting—she was an early champion of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still—her accomplishments as a maker are less acknowledged. For the magnificent exhibition “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World” at the Hessel Museum, curator Kelly Taxter and artist Amy Sillman focus on the artistic aspects of her legacy, gathering 81 of the paintings, works on paper, and sculptural assemblages that she created on the days she had off from being a dealer. Across these objects, her confident use of color and her assured gestural marks demonstrate that she was driven to make art, and did so in abundance, despite the time constraints of running a business promoting others.
