About Betty Bierne Pierson Parsons

  • Biography

    Better known as an art dealer than an artist, she had a self-named gallery that significantly promoted the careers of numerous abstract artists of the 1940s. In fact, by some critics, she was called the "midwife" of the New York School*.

    She grew up in an upper class existence in New York City and turned down a position on the U.S. Olympic tennis team to pursue her art career. She was married briefly and then divorced but kept her husband's name. From 1923 to 1933, she studied sculpture in Paris and was very much a part of avant-garde circles there that included Gertrude Stein, Alexander Calder, and Man Ray.

    The stock market crash forced her to return to the United States where she spent three years teaching ...

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