The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning

New York: Penguin Books, 1979. x, 246 pages, illustrations; 21 cm. Tight, clean copy. Age toning. This classic text on Abstract Expressionism considers the movement in relation to the cultural milieu of the thirties and forties (the influence of the Depression and World War Two) and intellectual history (thinkers such as Nietzsche, Dewey, Freud, Jung, Trotsky, Sartre, etc.). "With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the attention of the international art world turned from Paris to New York. In this book Dore Ashton captures the vitality of the cultural milieu in which the New York School artists worked and argued from the 1930s to the 1950s. Working from archival material, from contemporary newspapers and books, and from extensive conversations with the men and women who participated in the rise of the New York School, Ashton provides a cultural and intellectual history of this period. In examining the sources of this important movement - from the WPA program of the 1930s and the influx of European ideas to the recognition in the 1950s of American painting on an international scale - she conveys the concerns of an extraordinary group of artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman and Arshile Gorky. Documentary photographs illustrate Ashton's appraisal of the New York School scene." - Publisher. CONTENTS: 1. Greenwich Village; and depression; 2. 'Hell, it's not just about painting!'; 3. Artists and the New Deal; 4. A farrago of theories; 5. Studio talk; 6. The advent of Surrealism; 7. Voices from Europe; 8. Myth and metamorphosis; 9. American culture or mass culture?; 10. Abstract expressionism; 11. Artists and dealers; 12. Existentialism; 13. The Eight-street club; 14. 'Instantaneous tradition'; 15. The end of an era. . Paperback. Very Good. 8vo.