The Loft Generation
From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A candid and irreplaceable memoir of the mid-twentieth-century New York art scene and its colorful characters, by renowned artist and critic Edith Schloss.
The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly; Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011 is an invaluable account by Edith Schloss, an artist at the center of a landmark era in American art. Born in Germany, Schloss moved to New York City during World War II and became part of a thriving community of artists and intellectuals that included Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, John Cage, and Frank O'Hara. She married the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt.
As both a working artist and an incisive critic, Schloss was a candid and gimlet-eyed witness to the close-knit community that shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York. In Italy, she spent time with Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly, Meret Oppenheim, and Francesca Woodman.
The Loft Generation offers a rare and up-close record of an era of artistic innovation and the colorful characters who made it happen. Schloss's canny observations are indispensable reading for all critics and researchers of this vital period in American art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late artist and critic Schloss (1919–2011) brilliantly conveys her experiences as a participant in, and a keen observer of, New York's "loft generation," a community of American abstract expressionist painters, musicians, photographers, dancers, and artists who took up residence in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood in the 1940s and '50s. This posthumous book, thoughtfully edited by Venturini, combines Schloss's personal memoir with her art criticism to provide a riveting firsthand account of the daily lives, complex social interactions, and marital spats of artists—including Willem de Kooning, John Cage (a "dry Protestant Californian" whose early concerts attracted more painters than musicians), Denise Levertov, Francesca Woodman (a photographer "ahead of her time"), and Cy Twombly—whom she encountered living in New York and Italy. In addition to her eye for detail and ear for dialogue, Schloss brings a feminist perspective to her recollections; readers learn as much about Elaine de Kooning ("no one... ever had such style or courage") as they do her more famous husband, Bill, and many lesser-known female artists—including collage artist Lucia Vernarelli and surrealist painter Helen DeMottare—are treated with the same respect. Rich in granular detail and rendered in eloquent and captivating prose, this is an intimate look at a pivotal era in its formative stages and offers an invaluable source for the study of one of the great art movements.
