Mary Abbott

Mary Lee Abbott (July 27, 1921 – August 23, 2019) was an American artist, known as a member of the New York School of abstract expressionists in the late 1940s and 1950s. Her abstract and figurative work were also influenced by her time spent in Saint Croix and Haiti, where she lived off and on throughout the 1950s.

Early life and education Abbott was born in New York City, where she attended the Chapin School. Her family lineage traces back to John Adams, the second president of the United States. Her family would spend time in the summer in Southampton, New York in Long Island.

She was a student of artist George Grosz, while attending the Art Students League of New York. At the experimental school, Subjects of the Artist, Abbott worked with Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and David Hare. "Generally speaking the women at the Club weren't treated differently than anyone else -- an artist was an artist. Sometimes you might get treated like a girl because you were pretty. I was chosen to collect the dues and go buy the booze because I was pretty and the guys would pay up if I asked them to. Other times you had to be tough to be taken seriously," Abbott said. Abbott and de Kooning, alongside others including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, frequently visited the Cedar Tavern. This tavern is hailed as a famous meeting place for the Abstract Expressionist thinkers. Abbott has said that while there, they discussed ideas, art, and philosophy.

In the 1950s, Abbott began a collaborative project between herself and Barbara Guest, a first-generation poet at the New York School. Abbott made paintings she called "poetry paintings" that were directly inspired by the words and images associated with Guest's poetry.

In 2016 her work was included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.

She died at age 98 on August 23, 2019, of heart failure. From May 9 – June 28, 2025, the Schoelkopf Gallery mounted a retrospective of her work titled, Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination .