Clyfford Still

Osorio's eccentric East Hampton mansion.

Lavender mist was embedded within the exuberance of plants, Texas longhorn chairs, trophy stingrays, paintings by Jean Dubuffet and Clifford Still, and the mina birds pronouncing here today, gone tomorrow at stately intervals.

Even so, lavender mist with its pulsating webs of poured lines, its shimmering transparencies, and nearly 10-foot-long scale had no problem competing.

It focused light.

Mm-hmm.

Like, you can, like, there's obvious Clyfford Still references in it.

Mm-hmm.

And there's other kind of-[inhales] you know, 50s, 60s painting references in it.

Right? So there's-- But then, you know, then we get that big, fat circle or a big kind of fat, smooth color line or-

Mm-hmm

... you know, a big, black block-out, like, like a Clyfford Still.

And slowly it's moved from using that kind of, those, those, that language's moments of beauty-

Parsons supported Jackson Pollock.

Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clifford Still at a time when much of the art world remained focused on European modernism.

Leo Castelli presented the first Jasper Johns flag painting, Roy Lichtenstein's early comic strip paintings and Frank Seller's first shaped canvases.

In Mumbai, Kikugandi recognised the importance of an emerging modernist movement and helped Indian artists reach international audiences.

And more generally, the Art of the Century Gallery was a meeting place, and it was kind of one of those hangouts at the same time as the Cedar Bar, where people adored its avant-garde ambiance.

And the artists that were there when you'd go in would be everyone from André Breton to Tanguy, Léger, Marc Chagall, Duchamp was very close to Peggy and an important advisor to her Man Ray to the Americans Calder, Motherwell, Clifford Still and Jean-Paul Sartre One of the big gallerists at that time in New York, Leo Castelli, renowned for his own gallery, he was quoted as saying, Peggy's gallery was a sensation.

And you can't realize what an impression it made and how important it was.

Nothing of a similar nature had been done.

But he said, I'm interested only in expressing human emotions of tragedy, ecstasy and doom.

And he, you know, he often said that, you know, if I can confront with, through his work, those basic human emotions, you know, that, you know, he had a very spiritual drive in his work as well.

And he really, you know, like other New York school painters at the time, from Barnett Newman to Clifford Still, he, you know, for him, art was a profound form of communication.

And for him, he described art making as a moral act.