Abstract Expressionist Mary Abbott Finally Getting Her Due
- Editor OGN Daily
- Jun 7
- 2 min read
Abbott was an integral part of New York City’s mid-century avant-garde art scene, but her better-known male colleagues have long dominated the movement’s legacy.
Famous male artists such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, dominate the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. One of the few women in the scene was Mary Abbott, an artist who pushed the boundaries of the Abstract Expressionist movement. She worked alongside painters like Rothko and others for decades but rarely received similar levels of praise or recognition.
Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination, an exhibition on view at the Schoelkopf Gallery in New York City, seeks to change that. It’s the first major survey exhibition of Abbott’s entire career, which stretched from the 1940s to the early 2000s.
“It’s taken years for the establishment to embrace her contributions,” Alana Ricca, the gallery’s managing director, tells Cultured. “We are now in a very rich moment of reconsideration for artists that hadn’t achieved the same level of critical acclaim as certain of their peers.”
Click to expand images
All images courtesy of Schoelkopf Gallery and the Estate of Mary Abbott
Born in 1921, Abbott was a blue-blooded New Yorker who attended the finest all-girls schools in Manhattan and traced her family lineage back to two presidents (John Adams and John Quincy Adams). She took up painting at the age of 12.
“My paintings happen through a journey: dancing, seeing, waiting; destroying, discovering, doubting, guessing, finishing and reopening,” the gallery guide says Abbott was quoted as saying in Marika Herskovic’s 2003 book American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. “I like the process of painting.”
Some of the earliest works in the show date to the era of her first exhibition, titled Fifteen Unknowns, which opened at New York’s Kootz Gallery in 1950. The following year, she was featured in the 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, widely considered the formal debut of Abstract Expressionism.
Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination is on view at the Schoelkopf Gallery in New York City until 28 June 2025.
Blanche Hoschedé-Monet: Few names are as evocative as Claude Monet, the French artist who came to define the Impressionist movement. But there was more than one Monet. Known as the “forgotten Monet,” Blanche Hoschedé-Monet created roughly 300 fabulous Impressionist paintings. She’s now getting her first-ever solo exhibition in the United States, and hopefully will finally get the recognition she deserves.
