Inside the mind of Betty Parsons
Matthew Holman, RA Magazine
September 2025
Betty Parsons blazed a trail through the New York art world. She managed to be that rare thing: an art dealer whose reputation rivalled those of the painters whose work she sold. Best known for her eponymous New York gallery, which she opened in 1946 after inheriting most of the Venice-bound Peggy Guggenheim’s black book of artists, Parsons represented, as she called them, the ‘four horsemen’ of Abstract Expressionism: Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. But she was little driven by profits: ‘I never made money because I saw things too far in advance,’ she once remarked. […]