New Book on New York School Painters and Poets: Vogue’s “Exclusive Look”

 

 

 

Next week, the publisher Rizzoli will be releasing a terrific-sounding, major new book devoted to the New York School painters and poets — their shared aesthetic, their myriad collaborations, their boozing and chatting at the Cedar Tavern.  Titled New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight (with subtitle borrowed from Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away From Them“), the book is written by Jenni Quilter and edited by Allison Power, Bill Berkson, and Larry Fagin, with a foreword by art critic Carter Ratcliff.

From the publisher’s description:

New York School Painters & Poets charts the collaborative milieu of New York City poets and artists in the mid-twentieth century. This unprecedented volume comprehensively reproduces rare ephemera, collecting and reprinting collaborations, paintings, drawings, poetry, letters, art reviews, photographs, dialogues, manifestos, and memories. Jenni Quilter offers a chronological survey of this milieu, which includes artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Alex Katz, Jasper Johns, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and Rudy Burckhardt, plus writers John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Edwin Denby, Larry Fagin, Frank O’Hara, Charles North, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Anne Waldman, and more.

Vogue, of all places, has just posted an “exclusive look” at the new book by Alex Frank. The piece gives a quick overview of the New York School milieu and previews what the book has to offer:

Rizzoli’s new book, written by Jenni Quilter, captures their collaborations, like Joan Mitchell painting right on top of one of James Schuyler’s poems and Philip Guston’s enthusiastic line-drawing of Frank O’Hara and his characteristically broken nose. But 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.

It also features a nice slideshow of fourteen images drawn from the book, some familiar, others less so, including a great 1968 photograph of Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard running and grinning.  Check it out here.  Needless to say, I’m really excited to see this book!