New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight

Description

This book celebrates the art, friendship, and unparalleled creativity of this revered and subversive milieu, illuminating unities and tensions, playfulness and glamour, and a startling authenticity of collaboration. From 1936 to 1975, New York artists and writers socialized, lived with, and collaborated with each other on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an effusive body of work that produced one of the most significant movements in American arts and letters and until now has only been seen in fragments. Revered as the last avant-garde, this group (often associated with post-Abstract Expressionism and the early development of Pop Art) includes artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Alex Katz, Jasper Johns, and Larry Rivers, and writers Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Ted Berrigan, to name a few. This important volume comprehensively collects for the first time their collaborations, paintings, drawings, poetry, letters, art reviews, photographs, dialogues, manifestos, and memories. It features never-before-published material, rare ephemera, and first-hand accounts from the eyewitnesses to this moment when New York reasserted itself as the centre of the art world.

Jenni Quilter teaches at New York University. Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute. Larry Fagin edits Adventures in Poetry books and Sal Mimeo, a literary magazine. His publications include Dig and Delve and Complete Fragments, his collection of prose poems. Carter Ratcliff's books on art include Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975, and Andy Warhol: Portraits. Poet and translator Ron Padgett has edited and authored numerous books including his Collected Poems

"Starred Book. Assembling text, visual art, and their interstices, this sumptuous volume documents the collaborative playfield where the New York School poets and painters thrived. With occasional critical text to guide readers along, the majority of this image-heavy treat goes to ephemera and rarely seen work. The art and poems are kept company by photographs of their creators, collaborating and partying, as well as literary magazine covers, notebook entries, postcards, and similar miscellanea. Although often studied, the school is rarely given such intimate, collective attention, and even figures as familiar as Willem de Kooning and John Ashbery become dynamic and surprising once more in this volume's smart handling." -Publisher's Weekly "New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, dedicated to the vibrant scene...New York School movement cropped up in the fifties and centered around a group of post-war poets and painters who influenced, and in many instances even collaborated on, each other's work...it also catalogues how their lives intersected at houses in Manhattan and the Hamptons, and includes intimate photos of small poetry readings, group vacations and late-night parties in small apartments, giving readers a small window into the kind of special things that happen when the right people happen to overlap in New York." -Vogue "New York Painters & Poets is a fan's collection of ephemera, drawings, snapshots, newspaper reviews and interviews with key artists of the late 1940s-'50s in New York City. Everyone from Willem de Kooning to Jasper Johns is included, all of them partaking of the buttoned-down glamor of New York's explosion of non-representational art and free-form verse. More than nostalgia, the real theme is a way of life that in retrospect seems sweetly non-commercial, if a little addled by drink." -The Star Ledger