House Store

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Artist/Maker Betty Parsons (American, 1900 - 1982)

Date1977

MediumAcrylic on wood

DimensionsOverall: 18 9/16 × 15 3/16 × 1 1/2 in. (47.1 × 38.6 × 3.8 cm)

Credit LineGift of William G. Roehrick, Class of 1934, H1971

Object number1986.52

Not on view

DescriptionAlthough better known as the owner of a premier Manhattan art gallery—the dealer of Jackson Pollock and many other Abstract Expressionists—Betty Parsons was also an artist in her own right. She was initially inspired to become a sculptor by a teenaged visit to the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, and she trained in Paris under Antoine Bourdelle, Aleksandr Archipenko, and Ossip Zadkine. Her first exhibition took place in Paris in 1933. Later in life, in addition to paintings on paper, Parsons produced abstract assemblages from wood that washed up on the Long Island shore below her studio. She explained, “All of my wooden pieces were shaped by the hand of man. They were pieces of houses or docks or boats or signs. And something happened and they were lost. . . . And then they washed ashore, broken and changed, and I find them.” Parsons found her inspiration in the world around her, unlike the generation of artists she championed, whose work foregrounded emotional and expressive content that often originated in the subconscious mind. To her wood constructions—abstract, but often referred to by the artist as “personages”—Parsons applied stripes and patches of acrylic paint. The title of this example, House Store, mayallude to its shape or to the origin of the wood of which it is composed. It was created in the year the Jill Kornblee Gallery mounted an exhibition of Parsons’s work in New York and was donated to the Emerson Gallery in 1986. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017)

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Additional Details

Exhibition History 2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 105, illus.).

Provenance 1986: Hamilton College (Fred L. Emerson Gallery), by gift of William G. Roehrick.

Markings Labels: circular white adhesive label on verso at upper center with "38 / 18 x 15" in pencil; Betty Parsons Gallery label on verso at lower center with "BETTY PARSONS GALLERY / 24 WEST 57 STREET NEW YORK, N.Y. 10019 tel:212-247-7480 / House Store 1977 [in red ink]" in typeset.

Published References Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 232;

Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College, Friends of Art Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1, February 1988, "Acquisitions 1986"

Signature Not signed.

Inscribed "Houstore" on verso at lower center in ink [faded].