ABSTRACT
As a self-proclaimed 'life-time loner', Betty Holliday was less actively involved in the women's movement than many of her contemporaries, yet she was a prominent artist and teacher on Long Island. After her formal education, Holliday worked as an editorial associate for Art News (1950-55). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Holliday explored non-objectivity, but her figural abstractions attracted the earliest published critical attention. Around 1972, Holliday reintroduced limited color and returned to painting large figures, but with bolder brushstrokes and compositions that were simpler and more direct; she also made substantial alterations to earlier works. Holliday concurrently explored the themes of Marie-Louise and Marianne Moore throughout 1976, but they were soon disentangled and Holliday developed them as separate subjects. Holliday photographed her earliest full-length, standing figure of Marianne Moore in five stages of development, which illuminates its evolution.
