Partner Betty Parsons
Queer Places:
6 Stamford Bridge Studios, Wandon Road, Chelsea
29 Rue Boulard, 75014 Paris, France
Adge Baker (1920-1980) was an Anglo-Irish painter. She has a well publicised relationship with renowned New York artist and gallerist Betty Parsons over a period of eight years while both artists were living in Paris in 1924. They shared a house together for six years living on Rue Boulard in Montparnasse following Parsons’ divorce from fellow American Schuyler Livingston Parsons, eight years her senior. Supported by alimony while in Europe, Parsons spent her time in Paris painting and in the company of older like-minded members of the expatriate community such as Natalie Clifford Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas.
She returned to the United States in 1933 and later opened the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City in 1946 which soon became one of the most prestigious of the mid-twentieth century. It closed in 1981, a year before Parsons' death. Parson’s relationship in Paris with Adge Baker and her sexuality during her youth was stifled in her later years by the more repressive atmosphere she encountered in the US following WWII. Nonetheless, Parsons remains a very significant symbol of struggle against social oppression and is remembered as a staunch supporter of liberal thinking within the artistic community in America.
My published books:
