Lesbian identity and the politics of representation in Betty Parsons's gallery.
Although Betty Parsons had been unusually open about her love relationships with women in the twenties and thirties, she later became reticent, retiring to the closet. Her increased discretion after World War II, during the Cold War, coincided with her rise as the art dealer most prominently associated with the international emergence of Abstract Expressionism. Parsons incurred the objections of her Abstract Expressionists, however, by showing artists who included both abstraction and naturalism in their work, such as Sonia Sekula, Forrest Bess, and Hedda Sterne. This article examines her definition of abstraction as difference through her friend Theodoros Stamos's notion of camp and helps to explain her admiration of Barnett Newman despite her refusal to devote her gallery exclusively to his narrower version of significant abstraction.
Gibson
A
A
Art Department, S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook 11794-5400.
D001154:Art / Q000266:history*; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D049673:History, 20th Century; D018452:Homosexuality, Female / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D011057:Politics; D014481:United States