Perle Pictures Frame

Mary Abbott, who passed away in 2019, was one of the last living artists present for the birth of — and who participated in — the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York City in the late 1940s.

A descendant of John and John Quincy Adams, Abbott's father, Naval Commander Henry Abbott, served in Roosevelt’s war cabinet. Her mother, Elizabeth Grinnell, was a poet and syndicated columnist and her aunt, Mary Ogden Abbott, was a well-known sculptor and big game hunter. Abbot’s childhood was spent between New York; Boston; Washington, D.C.; Concord, MA; and Southampton, NY.

As a child Abbott aspired to be a herpetologist and an artist. She took classes in D.C. with Eugene Weiss at the Corcoran School and later in New York at the Art Students League, studying with George Gross and Morris Kantor. Introduced to André Breton and the expat Surrealist group in New York by David Hare, Abbot joined the Subjects of the Artist, an unorthodox school run by Hare, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. In the late 1940s Abbott worked with Rothko and Newman and fostered a lifelong close relationship with Willem de Kooning.

Find a collection of original Mary Abbott paintings on 1stDibs.

Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.

Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.

Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.

Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.

Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.

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