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A fascinating, panoramic exploration of art and culture in mid-twentieth-century New York City from one of our most important and influential art critics.
Knopf
October 2005
656 pages
ISBN: 1400041317
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
New Art City takes us from the solitude of the artist’s
studio to the uproarious bars where artists gathered, from
the ramshackle bohemian neighborhoods of downtown Manhattan
to the Midtown streets where steel-and-glass skyscrapers
were rising and art galleries were proliferating. We
encounter a kaleidoscopic range of artists. There are
legendary figures–Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Willem de
Kooning, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd–as
well as still undervalued ones, such as the galvanic
teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan
Mitchell, the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, and
the eccentric thinker John Graham. We encounter, too, the
writers, critics, patrons, and hangers-on who rounded out
the artists’ world. Jed Perl helps us see what the artists
were creating and understand how they confronted an
exploding art audience. And he makes clear how the economic
boom of the late 1950s and the increasingly enthusiastic
response to Abstract Expressionism ushered in the rapacious
art world of the 1960s and the theatricality of Pop Art. Artists drew strength from the dizzying onslaught of
Manhattan, and produced a tidal wave of new forms. These
included Hofmann’s brazen flourishes of color; Pollock’s
quicksilver skeins of paint unfurling panoramic arabesques;
and the crushed, jagged, turning-back-on-itself calligraphy
of de Kooning’s gnomic alphabets. And there was much more:
Burgoyne Diller’s levitating rectangles; Nell Blaine’s
explosive renderings of quotidian scenes; Ellsworth Kelly’s
extraordinary simplifications, suggesting sails or
semaphores. A brilliant tapestry of social history, biographical
portraiture, and criticism, New Art City illuminates a
revolutionary, unprecedented time and place in American
culture.
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