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Like so many other skilled women abstract painters of her generation, Mary Abbott is overdue for some market recognition. For years, auction prices for her work have lagged behind primary market prices. Is the secondary market starting to catch up?

At the ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York last week, Berry Campbell sold Abbott’s Ariel Wind (ca. 1951) for $185,000 on the opening day of the fair. That figure is nearly 20 percent more than the artist’s auction record of $156,000, which was just set on October 2, when an untitled 1957 work sold at Sotheby’s New York in an online auction. The final sale price was a whopping 680 percent higher than the $15,000–$20,000 estimate, according to Artnet’s Price Database.

Mary Abbott. Photo courtesy of McCormick Gallery, Chicago.

McCormick Gallery, which has represented Abbott for two decades, sold a $525,000 canvas by the artist at Expo Chicago in April. It marked the highest reported price paid to date for one of her works.

Upon Abbott’s death in 2019, at the age of 98, her paintings had only appeared at auction a dozen times, with the highest price achieved being $28,125 for the 2008 sale of an untitled work at Sotheby’s. Artnet’s database analytics show that over the last five years, the average price for her work at auction has risen by nearly 240 percent.

Abbott was known for her colorful paintings with signature sweeping brush strokes. In 2008, the New York Times praised her as “one of the last great Abstract Expressionist painters of her generation.” Despite that, her work received little scholarly attention until 2016, when the Denver Art Museum organized the well-received exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism.”

Berry Campbell partners Christine Berry and Martha Campbell said they were “so pleased” to continue the gallery’s mission by presenting an exhibition of postwar women artists for their debut outing at the Art Show this year. Ariel Wind is a seminal early example of gestural abstraction, according to the gallerists, who added that “collectors are surprised to learn that they can still buy an A+ example from an important Abstract Expressionist for a comparatively reasonable price.”