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Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
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Overview
Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.
Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life.
Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780316226172 |
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Publisher: | Little, Brown and Company |
Publication date: | 09/24/2019 |
Pages: | 944 |
Sales rank: | 39,114 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction xi
Prologue: The Ninth Street Show, New York, May 1951 5
Part 1 1928-1948
Lee
1 Lena, Lenore, Lee 21
2 The Gathering Storm 35
3 The End of the Beginning 44
Elaine
4 Marie Catherine Mary Ellen O'Brien Fried's Daughter 55
5 The Master and Elaine 66
Art in War
6 The Flight of the Artists 77
7 It Is War, Everywhere, Always 90
8 Chelsea 100
9 Intellectual Occupation 110
10 The High Beam 122
11 A Light That Blinds, I 136
12 A Light That Blinds, II 148
The Turning Point
13 It's 1919 Over Again! 165
14 Awakenings 173
15 Separate Together 182
16 Peintres Maudits 195
17 Lyrical Desperation 203
18 Death Visits the Kingdom of the Saints 217
19 The New Arcadia 226
Part 2 1948-1951
Grace
20 The Call of the Wild 241
21 The Acts of the Apostles, I 255
22 The Acts of the Apostles, II 262
23 Fame 271
24 The Flowering 284
25 Riot and Risk 296
Helen
26 The Deep End of Wonder 311
27 The Thrill of It 326
28 The Puppet Master 340
Joan
29 Painted Poems 357
30 Mexico to Manhattan via Paris and Prague 371
31 Waifs and Minstrels 387
Part 3 1951-1955
Oh, to Leave a Trace
32 Coming Out 405
33 The Perils of Discovery 414
34 Said the Poet to the Painter 422
35 Neither by Design nor Definition 439
Discoveries of Heart and Hand
36 Swimming against a Riptide 457
37 At the Threshold 468
38 Figures and Speech 480
39 Refuge 493
40 A Change of Art 505
41 Life or Art 518
42 The Red House 530
Five Women
43 The Grand Girls, I 547
44 The Grand Girls, II 560
45 The Grand Girls, III 576
Part 4 1956-1959
The Rise and the Unraveling
46 Embarkation Point 593
47 Without Him 608
48 The Gold Rush 620
49 A Woman's Decision 635
50 Sputnik, Beatnik, and Pop 650
51 Bridal Lace and Widow's Weeds 661
52 Five Paths… 676
53 …Forward 687
Epilogue 701
Acknowledgments 717
Copyright and Permissions Acknowledgments 723
Notes 727
Bibliography 866
Index 892
What People are Saying About This
“Reading this was sheer delight. Well beyond biography, art history and gender studies, Ninth Street Women enthralled me with the profound inventions and reckless passions of a lost New York art world. Mary Gabriel has forever replaced the clichéd and cobwebbed tropes about the heyday of abstract expressionism with a richly detailed epic starring not only five heroic female painters—Lee, Elaine, Grace, Joan and Helen—but a supporting cast that defines the entire existential and Beat era, from Frank O’Hara to Billie Holliday to Samuel Beckett. Her vision of Lee Krasner jazz dancing with Piet Mondrian alone is worth the price of the book. With palpable empathy for the flawed brilliance of her five stars, their jealous foes and long-suffering enablers, Gabriel conjures the high risk paths they chose, what making great art cost their lives, and what they lost and won in the end. I was transported from the soulless pomp of today's art "market" to those spirited days (and very long nights) when artists, dealers, curators and collectors were passionate about the art—not just money.”
“Mary Gabriel has written a fascinating, meticulously researched account of five painters who broke through the gender barriers in the art world of the 1950s. No matter how much we know about this foundational period in American art, there is still more to learn, and Gabriel is deft at teasing out the behind the scenes drama in these women’s lives and careers. Essential reading for any student of the period, and of the New York School generally.”
“Gabriel has produced a sweeping panorama of American art history in the decades around World War II—specifically Abstract Expressionism and the rise of US art world dominance internationally. Mining hundreds of rare and original sources, notably memoirs, unpublished interviews, and other meticulously referenced sources, she highlights and synthesizes the singular but coinciding stories—the lives and work—of five signal New York School women painters into one highly readable narrative of interconnections, influences and personal histories that ultimately produced today’s roaring art market. Gabriel has provided a major contribution to the literature of 20th century cultural and social history that will remain a resource for decades to come.”
“I wasn’t even finished with Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women before insisting others need to read it. Gabriel’s book tells the forgotten story everyone should know. A heroic undertaking as sprawling and inspired as the canvases it describes, here at long last is the full chronicle of Abstract Expressionism. That is, the stories of five remarkable women artists who created the first thoroughly American art movement alongside the men who would be famous first. A necessary, urgent history of art, Ninth Street Women is a rollicking good read to boot.”
“Mary Gabriel’s masterful collective biography turns standard accounts of Abstract Expressionism inside out. Mixing critical insight with juicy storytelling, she brings five brilliant female painters to the fore of the art revolution that cut a wide swath in postwar America. Brava to Ninth Street Women!”
“A knowing chronicle of the high-energy New York art world of the fifties and sixties, Ninth Street Women profoundly reframes our understanding. At last we see such once sidelined artists as Joan Mitchell and Elaine de Kooning in depth, and the accumulating view of both the telling gossip of their lives and the brave authenticity of their work is thrilling. Mary Gabriel restores the humanist ambition at the core of all the New York painters of this era, whether male or female--the boldness of their risky lives and the seriousness of their noble enterprise. I loved every page of this necessary book.”
“An utterly enthralling book. Mary Gabriel tells a calm and objective story that nevertheless arouses so many emotions—in this reader at any rate—as she made me share every turbulent moment of these remarkable women’s lives. The book is a magisterial reference (her scholarship is extraordinary), one that will be the definitive text for years to come. It is also the most devastatingly accurate portrayal of five women who had the temerity to call themselves artists in the male-dominated 20th century. I can’t remember the last time I read such a gripping and enthralling book, one that had me so emotionally involved that I cursed the art world that tried to marginalize them and cheered the guts, grit, and sheer genius that kept them working.”
“Ninth Street Women is cultural history in the best sense. Gabriel brilliantly shows how the women of Abstract Expressionism carved out paths for themselves in an often hostile community, fashioning careers and producing exciting work fully as important as that of their male peers—men whom they befriended, married, bedded, or disdained. Each of these women’s lives is vividly brought to life, and Ninth Street Women is a colorful narrative as compelling as a novel.”