MARY ABBOTT
Two color pastels.

Patience * City Nightingale's Song. Both color pastels on cream wove paper. Both 198x238 mm; 7 3/4x9 1/2 inches. Both signed in ink, lower right recto, and titled in ink, verso, one signed in ink, verso.

Provenance: Private collection, New York.

Abbott (1921-2019) was born in New York City to a prominent family descended from John Quincy Adams. She knew she wanted to pursue art from a young age and studied with George Grosz at the Art Students League before continuing her studies at Subjects of the Artist (a short-lived school that promoted avant-garde art movements such as Abstract Expressionism) where she worked with Mark Rothko, David Hare and Barnett Newman. She set up a studio on 10th Street in Manhattan and associated with the circle of artists that included Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and was one of three female members of "The Club" who met weekly to discuss art. She enjoyed spending time in nature and her work often captured her emotional response to the world around her, rearranging elements of the natural world in abstraction. She has said about her work: "I like the process of painting. 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."

 

Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000