2 cuts at 2col each

Charlotte Park (b 1918), untitled, circa early 1960s, oil on canvas, 50 by 50 inches.

Betty Parsons (1900–1982), “Yield,” 1975, acrylic on driftwood, 31 by 20½ inches.

MUST RUN 5-30

AN EAST END TRADITION AT SPANIERMAN GALLERY w/2 cuts

avv/lsb set 5/22 #740320

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Spanierman Gallery LLC at East Hampton presents “An East End Tradition: Six Artists,” on view through June 23. Featured in the exhibition are the works of six noted painters whose association with the East End of Long Island reflects the impact of an area that has been inspired many generations of artists.

Attention to Betty Parson’s position as a gallery owner has often overshadowed a consideration of her own career as an artist, but throughout the years that she championed many of the leading Abstract Expressionist artists of her era — Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman — she continued to paint and sculpt, creating a compelling and original body of work that has only recently received critical acclaim.

Transcending the often purely formal and dogmatic issues that preoccupied many artists of the day, Parsons (b 1900) used an innovative approach to color and form to express her observations on a wide range of topics — from phenomena in nature to Native American and Chinese culture to the cosmos and her own childhood.

The tradition of abstraction on Long Island that Parsons fostered was also reinforced by the married artists Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, both born in 1904, who beginning in 1948 lived in the large home they built at Montauk Point. Gertrude Greene is represented in the exhibition by collage and drawings from the 1930s, in which she combined aspects of biomorphic Surrealism with a constructivist architectonic sensibility, as well as by the works of her later years on Long Island, when she came under the influence of Abstract Expressionism.

Balcomb Greene was a strong public promoter of American abstraction and held an important role in its widespread acceptance. In “Woman and Man by the Sea,” 1972, Greene brought abstract principles to a figural subject, treating his forms as planes of light, shadow and movement.

Born in 1918, Charlotte Park, who studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts, moved to The Springs, East Hampton, in 1949, along with her husband, fellow artist James Brooks. In her approach to Abstract Expressionism, she combined irregular shapes and runic strokes of light colors to form a reductive painterly vocabulary with which she referenced signs of the ocean, bay and countryside of Long Island.

Another artist lured by the East End was Jimmy Ernst, who settled in east Hampton in 1969. Born in Cologne, Germany, in 1920, Ernst had a long and eventful career before this move. The son of Max Ernst, a leading figure in European Surrealism, he knew many of the most important artists of his time during his youth. His own work reflected his penchant for experimentation and consummate skills as a technician.

The legacy of Jackson Pollock was perpetuated by the artist Dan Christensen until his death in 2007. Born in 1942, Christensen began to paint in his teens after seeing the works of Pollock on a trip to Denver from his home in Nebraska.

Experimenting with new painting techniques, Christensen received critical praise for his use of spray paint guns and window wiper squeegees to produce compositions that emanated from his media but that were largely not predetermined.

The gallery is at 68 Newtown Lane. For more information, www.spainierman-at-easthampton.com or 631-329-9530.