Southampton Artist Mary Abbott Featured in Expansive Retrospective in Tribeca

Mary Abbott put down roots in Southampton almost as early as she could remember. Born in New York City in 1921, Abbott spent the summers of her youth under the Hamptons sunshine with her grandmother, exploring all the space and shorelines that Long Island had to offer. Her childhood split between Southampton and Manhattan’s Upper East Side foreshadowed the geographic trajectory of her nearly eight-decade-long painting career, as Abbott lived and worked at least part-time in her Southampton residences for the rest of her life.

Abbott was far from the first artist to call Long Island, or even Southampton, her home. Artists had been traveling out East for decades before Abbott was even born, rendering the history of American painting forever tied to Abbott’s familiar Southampton. Among the first Abstract Expressionists to move out of New York City were Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock in November 1948, followed shortly by Elaine and Willem de Kooning in the mid-1950s. A stone’s throw away from Pollock was the painter Fairfield Porter, and critic Harold Rosenberg, who coined the influential term “Action Painting” in 1952. Soon, the Hamptons became home to gallerists like Alfonso Ossorio and Leo Castelli, and New York School poets Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch.

In 1950, Mary Abbott rented a barn in Southampton and began to work on many of her largest canvases. Abbott was continuously inspired by the natural world that abounded before her in the Hamptons, its lush landscapes serving as a constant source of influence. When she was not busy painting, there was plenty of time to enjoy the comforts of Hamptons life. Friends she had known in the city — Grace Hartigan, the de Koonings, Rosenbergs, Castellis, and other members of the Abstract Expressionist group known as The Club — would often convene in the Hamptons for dinner parties, informal group discussions, and long days at the beach. As more Abstract Expressionists grew interested in the Hamptons landscape, so too did the Hamptons begin to embrace them.

Growing interest in Abstract Expressionism throughout the Hamptons inspired exhibitions featuring Abbott at historic institutions like Guild Hall, which houses her work in its permanent collection, and a budding gallery scene with the opening of Signa Gallery, the Hamptons’ first commercial art gallery, in 1957. One of Abbott’s earliest solo shows took place at Robert Keene Gallery in Southampton in 1958.

As the artistic landscape of the Hamptons changed throughout the following decades, Abbott’s ties to Southampton remained a constant. She continued to paint daily using her garage as her studio and some works bear titles revealing their Hamptons origins, from Southampton to Corrigan Street to Watermill Beach. Her impact on the Hamptons was recognized in 2011 when Abbott was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ArtHamptons art fair in Bridgehampton. A decade later, Abbot achieved her first solo institutional exhibition, “The Living Possibility of Paint,” at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton. In 2019, Abbott died in her studio at age 98 after calling Southampton her home for almost 70 years.

Today, the mark she made on the Hamptons and on American art lives on in a new exhibition opening at Schoelkopf Gallery in Tribeca. “Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination,” is the first significant retrospective exhibition of Abbott’s work in New York. The exhibition is on view through June 28, and presents the full scope of Abbott’s painterly practice, from large-scale canvas collages to bold paintings on paper. Spanning 1940 to 2002, the works on view demonstrate Abbott’s immense contributions to Abstract Expressionism, including her intrepid exploration of color, form, and media.