Books I'm Reading: New Art City

2023 has not been a great year for reading. There was a time, when, living in Tokyo, when I had a long commute, that I read a book a week or more using my time on the train to and from work. Since returning to the US, 22 years ago now, I've been reading a book a month or so, but this year, with the death of my mother in January and all the responsibilities that stemmed from that, I've been able to get through only a handful of titles. 

I most recently finished Jed Perl's New Art City (Vintage, 2007), which was an interesting look at New York in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but rather dense and I was slow to get through it. It starts off with a chapter that underscores the importance of Hans Hoffman as a teacher in New York in the 1930s before moving on to look at the major artists of the period based in New York – Joseph Cornell, Jackson Pollack, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and others – as well as the critics who were writing about these men and women. Inspired, I'm now reading a book about Helen Frankenthaler, and I have another on deck specifically, about the women who were working as artists in New York during the period. So many books, so little time....