Mary Abbott

Mary Abbott (1921-2019) was among the early and important exponents of Abstract Expressionism, an accomplished American painter whose powerful oil paintings combine spontaneous gestural brushwork with a highly inventive use of color. Widely admired for the energy and vital immediacy of her work, Abbott devoted her career to translating sensation directly into paint, producing canvases that carry an unmistakable emotional charge.

Born in New York City, Abbott developed an early interest in art that led her in the early 1940s to enroll in courses at the Art Students League, where she studied with painters including George Grosz. She lived primarily in New York during these years but spent time in Washington as well, studying with Eugene Weiss of the Corcoran Museum School. During the same period Abbott also worked as a fashion model, appearing on the covers of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. In 1948 she met the sculptor David Hare, who introduced her to an experimental school called The Subject of the Artist, and through these associations she moved into the heart of the New York avant-garde.

Back in New York, Abbott became a member of the Artists' Club, where she was one of only three female members alongside Perle Fine and Elaine de Kooning. She was deeply inspired by Newman and Rothko, who, as she later recalled, "taught us to draw imagination." She subsequently abandoned her interest in recognizable subject matter and the art of the School of Paris in favor of pure abstraction. Her commitment to intuitive painting was further deepened around 1948 or 1949, when Abbott met Willem de Kooning, with whom she would go on to share a lengthy personal and professional relationship. In the early 1950s she began exhibiting extensively, with shows at Kootz, Tibor de Nagy, and Tanager, and she was included in three of the famous Stable Gallery Annuals.

During the early 1950s, Abbott also spent time with her second husband, Tom Clyde, in the Virgin Islands, where she produced a substantial body of work. The couple later moved to Southampton, New York, which would become one of her enduring bases. In the 1970s she taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis before eventually returning to New York, and she continued to maintain homes in both the city and the Hamptons.

Abbott continued to paint into her later years with undiminished enthusiasm. "I like the process of painting," she once said. "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." Her work is held today in significant American museum collections.