Parsons' Gaze Fixed On Five Decades of Art
By Debbie K. Solomon and Eliot S. Berkowitz
Herald Staff Writers
The Miami Herald
Art Review
June 15th, 1980
To anyone else, the clouds over Biscayne Bay might have seemed as. ordinary as those on any other June evening. But through the steel blue eyes of Betty Parsons, those formations of cumuli seemed as wondrous as the art forms in oil and acrylic that fill her New York gallery walls.
"The clouds are lining up for us," she said, her hands molding the shapes as she described them. "It's like music. This creative thing is a mysterious thing. You can find it in the sky, you can find it in the gutter."
Possessing an eye for observation that could put a hawk to shame, Betty Parsons has applied her keen perceptions to the art world for more than five decades and has become unofficially known as the grande dame of contemporary art.
"Look, just look," she pleaded last week, as she toured Dade County and taped a television interview to be broadcast on WPLG-Ch. 10 Saturday morning. For 80 years, Parsons has looked. In particular, she's looked at Jackson Pollock's painted drips. And Clyfford Still's ragged zips. And Mark Rothko's luminous surfaces.
What makes Parsons special is that she was the first to look. In 1946, she opened her gallery doors to a handful of hungry artists whose names would later read like the roster of contemporary art.
Scratch any art dealer and you're likely to find a collector below. Sure enough, Parson's public lectures here included slide shows of prized works from her private collection. Casually, she flipped through her slides as if they were family photographs. They are. With mother's pride, she speaks of her artistic protégés. "Jackson sometimes threw cigarets at the canvas or whatever came into his mind at the time," she said of Pollock.
INVITED HERE by [Virginia Miller on behalf of] the Metropolitan Museum and Art Centers to educate the public on the virtue and value of abstract art, Parsons refused to preach. "She's not here to give you an art history lesson, but to give you the guts to see," said Virginia Miller, an art dealer who will be showing Parsons' own paintings and sculptures at [Miller’s] Coconut Grove gallery next February.
Parsons last week took questions from lecture audiences eager to resolve the most difficult question of all: What is art, and, in this case, what in a painting indicates its quality to Betty Parsons?
"Most people," she said, "when they look at a picture, they are looking for an arm or a leg or an eye or a bird or a tree — something. It's the wrong way to look at an abstract painting. You should look for space, form, light, tension and rhythm."
Assemblage by Betty Parsons
Betty Parsons
THE BEST WAY to appreciate a painting is just to look, and to look intently, she explained.
To audience queries on the merits of art programs in public schools, she replied: "Why shouldn't the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, the man who delivers my pictures, or the plumber or the electrician know something about art? It's a creative thing. It's a healthy thing."
Whether there's much art to look at in South Florida is doubtful, she said. Miamians "are just beginning to realize that there's another dimension to life besides eating and drinking and sleeping. People here like to sail, swim, play tennis and golf. I don't think there's very much interest in thinking in these kinds of tropical places. Everybody would just rather live."
Not that Betty Parsons has anything against life. She refers to her own as a "dance," one whose steps have led her through careers as an art dealer, collector and artist. Those alone might seem adequate accomplishments to fill three biographies, but to Parsons, it's not enough. "I'd like to go to the moon," she said.
In conversation, she often returns to the theme of "energy," used to characterize both the paintings she admires and the style by which she lives her life. "I never think of tiring," she said. "I never think whether I'm old or young. As long as I have my health, my energy, my interests, I'll carry on. I'll probably die in my gallery in the middle of the night hanging a new show."
