Untitled (ca. 1951) is an early example of one of Betty Parsons’s signature approaches to abstraction, which she advanced in the early 1960s. Free-floating biomorphic forms in white punctuate a bright red monochromatic field, which Parsons realized in loose brushstrokes that allow small areas of the paper to remain visible. As critic Roberta Smith describes, Parsons “isolates shapes of color on contrasting grounds, like islands in a sea, or windows in the corner of a room.” This work is a key example of Parsons’s keen sense of color, with blue-green accent strokes further distinguishing the forms against their background. In a further activation of the compositional surface, Parsons has used the back of her paintbrush to etch into the wet gouache.