...Personally, I found the two shows complementary, but I was there primarily to see the eighty works assembled by painter Amy Sillman (Bard MFA, 1995) and Artists Space in New York’s deputy director Kelly Taxter (a 2003 CCS alumna) for “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World.”
Parsons (1900–1982) is renowned as the art dealer who stuck by such titanic AbExers as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still through their initial drubbing by critics (after which they left her gallery). She achieved more lasting results (ably assisted by the distinctive future gallerist Jack Tilton) with the likes of Barbara Chase-Riboud, Chryssa, Paul Feeley, Brian O’Doherty, Saul Steinberg, and Richard Tuttle.
The thing is, Parsons had trained as an artist, and if her abstractions paled beside Rothko’s, they still appeared in galleries here and there over decades. Her work hibernated in storage until 2017, when New York’s Alexander Gray Associates began representing the Parsons estate on behalf of her nephew and sole heir, the late William P. Rayner. (Alison Jacques takes care of business in London.)
At Bard, Taxter and Sillman give vibrant life to a chronological installation that begins with early landscapes, moves through all manner of abstraction, flirts with Minimal geometries, and takes flight with the painted driftwood sculptures that Parsons made after her retirement to the North Fork of Long Island.
“It was my idea to do the show,” Sillman told me. “I proposed it to Kelly four years ago, when she was at the Parish Museum for a minute, and then she approached Tom Eccles. It was my idea to paint a wall and put work on it, and also paint the plinth and put the sculpture on it.”
How had Sillman discovered Parsons? “I know things!” she shouted. “I read, I look, I care about painting, and I know all about Betty. She had a studio across the street from me in Southold.” To see another artist so involved with the show seemed especially fitting. The painters championed by Parsons were the only people to encourage her own work, she says, in archival interviews unearthed by filmmakers G. Anthony Svatek and Kaija Siirala for the illuminating multichannel video they made for the show.
“It’s wonderful to hear Betty’s voice,” marveled Rayner’s widow, the philanthropist Katharine J. Rayner, who arrived with the leatherman architect Peter Marino. He owns the largest private Parsons collection, on view this summer in clever juxtaposition with paintings by Carla Accardi at the Peter Marino Foundation in Southampton. But even he hadn’t seen the bulk of the works at the Hessel; nor had Rayner. She gestured toward a modest canvas best described as a fallopian landscape. Turning to Alexander Gray, she said, “I really must have that one.”
At the blissfully unseated dinner that followed in a tent on the grounds, Sillman regaled the hundreds of artists, curators, collectors, and writers present with the story of an encounter that evening with a senior artist whom Parsons had rejected. “I have three things to say,” the woman told Sillman. “You spelled Feeley wrong on the wall label. I wouldn’t sleep with Betty, so she didn’t give me a show. And you shouldn’t have put those objects on a striped wall. It looks fucking horrible.” Added Sillman, “She’s the only person I don’t dedicate this show to.”
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Read full article at artforum.com.
