"Betty Parsons and the women" at Anita Shapolsky

Few art dealers have gained the legendary stature achieved by Betty Parsons (1900-1982) in the course of her representation and exhibition of the artists of her day, Parsons was a discoverer of new talent and a fosterer of careers, bringing work to an interested audience she herself helped form. Between 1946 and 1983 (when the gallery closed), she represented Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, among others, for various periods. She also showed the work of many women artists at a time when women faced difficulty in gaining entry to a largely male-dominated system.

Anita Shapolsky Gallery's satisfying exhibition "Betty Parsons and the Women" offered a look at selected works by a few of these women--Judith Godwin and Buffie Johnson (both still living), Jeanne Reynal, Jeanne P. Miles and Ethel Schwabacher as well as Parsons herself--providing an opportunity for reassessment. Godwin enjoyed the substance and malleability of paint in vigorously brushed fields of oil that dominate vertically oriented paintings from the late 1950s. In more recent work, the 3-by-4-foot Flux (1982) explodes with a palette reminiscent of Kandinsky in the early 1920s, while the more intimate 2-by-2 1/2-foot Propel (1990) offers a generous vocabulary of paint handling, from a stained ground to passages of medium alternately brushed, scraped and laid down with a knife. Johnson is best represented by the 4-by-5-foot oil The Flower Ritual (1959), a file of curving forms on an expanse the color of wisteria, and Sun Wedding (1961), a bright, overall field of abstract calligraphy. Schwabacher's 4-by-6-foot oil-on-canvas Return and Departure (1956) was among the strongest in the show. Horizontal bands make up an abstract landscape on a green ground, with a freely limned yellow and red scrawl placing her work in the context of an entire generation of expressive painters.

Special emphasis was given to Reynars endeavors in mosaic, showing a random scattering of the broken bits of rock and glass that form their tesserae. The 29-inch diameter Sphere (ca. 1950s, cement and mixed mediums) has the look of a mandala of turquoise, orange and yellow fragments on a gold ground. It is supported by rods and a pedestal. In Miles's Musical Squares (1953), a monochrome geometry in red oil on a wood support, the lively tumbling elements culminate in a single gold-leaf square set on end near top center. Known for her assemblies of painted wood, Parsons was represented by paintings that show a confident, fully developed signature technique consisting of an underpainted field largely eradicated by overpainting. A sophisticated 20-by-16-inch acrylic on canvas, Silver (1972) consists of a red field painted over a ground of white and blue; the few remaining bits of ground tend toward the corners, where they seem about to rise and spin. Accompanied by an informative catalogue, the exhibition was also on view at the Opalka Gallery of the Sage Colleges in Albany.

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