"Untitled"

Original oil pastel on archival paper by the renowned New York artist, Mary Abbott. Signed lower right. Untitled. Circa 1970. Condition is very good. Presently unframed. Sheet size 30 by 22 inches. Rich red flowers in a vibrant blue vase. Provenance: A East Hampton, New York collector.

Born in New York City in 1921, Abbott, a descendant of US presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, knew she wanted to pursue art from a young age. When she was seventeen, she studied at the Art Students League under the tutelage of George Grosz and went on to attend the Corcoran Museum School in Washington, DC, where she took classes with Eugene Weiss. In addition to painting, she also had a career as a model and was featured on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

In 1943, Abbott married Lewis R. Teague, a painter and soldier in the US Army. Abbott moved around with Teague as he was assigned to different posts until they split in 1946. That same year, the artist relocated to Greenwich Village in New York, where she found an apartment on Tenth Street, now synonymous with the community of artists who would carve out a postwar avant-garde. Not long after she befriended David Hare, who introduced her to the experimental school Subjects of the Artist, where she met and learned from Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, who invited her to join “The Club,” a group that gathered weekly in the East Village to drink and discuss art. The only other female members of the clique were Perle Fine and Elaine de Kooning.

Abbott would eventually marry the businessman Tom Clyde, with whom she traveled to the islands of the Caribbean, where the tropical foliage fueled her creative output. When the union ended in 1966, she became a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Ten years later, she returned to New York, where she maintained homes in Manhattan and Southampton. Over the course of her career, Abbott exhibited her work at galleries such as Kootz, Tibor de Nagy, and Tanager, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, among other museums, and was represented by the McCormick Gallery in Chicago. She died at the age of 98 in 2019 in Southampton, New York. Biography courtesy of Artforum.