Mary Abbott

Note: Mary Abbott helped to develop Abstract Expressionism as part of the New York School in the 1940s and 1950s and is recognized as one of the prominent members of the group. Despite painting alongside and having friends in the highest circle of the movement, her work has often been overlooked in favor of her famous contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. Abbott’s family were members of New York’s social elite. They were descendants of President John Adams and close friends with the Roosevelts. She was a socialite in the early 1940s and had a brief modeling career with cover photos in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour. At the age of nine, Abbott battled a severe infection and pneumonia that forced her to stay inside for nearly two years, during which time she discovered a love for visual art. While modelling, she enrolled in the Art Students League of New York and took classes at the Corcoran Museum School in Washington, D.C. Originally drawn to landscapes and painting in nature, Abbott took after her namesake aunt, Mary Ogden Abbott, who was a sculptor, explorer and landscape painter. Between her aunt and mother, who was a poet, the artistic women in her life influenced her to pursue a career as an artist.

After a brief marriage, Abbott moved downtown and became a fixture within the inner circles of the Abstract Expressionist movement, one of the few women members of the unofficial club that met at New York’s Cedar Street Tavern. She was drawn to abstraction and has said of the shift: “It just hit me. I just liked it. Trying to do things representationally didn’t work for me. [With abstraction] I could talk in a different way.” After her marriage to her second husband in 1950, she began spending summers in Haiti and the Virgin Islands, where the environmental surroundings inspired her work greatly and led to a flourishing period in her painting. Throughout the 1950s, she continued to show her work in galleries internationally. In 1966, Abbott and her husband divorced, and she spent most of the 1970s teaching at the University of Minnesota. She eventually moved back to New York where she lived until her death. Abbott’s pioneering artistic legacy is a rich one and only recently receiving the scholarly recognition it deserves.