The Slip
The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
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4.7 • 7개의 평가
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- US$17.99
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Longlisted for the National Book Award · A New York Times Notable Book of the Year · Winner of the New York City Book Award · Shortlisted for the Apollo Book of the Year Award · Shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography · Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize · Finalist for the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award at Interlochen
The never-before-told story of an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan and the remarkable artists who got their start there.
For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art.
Now, for the first time, Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip’s eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry; and, in the artists’s own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art—eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city’s many former lives.
An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art historian Peiffer's enchanting debut revisits the art scene that emerged in New York City's Coenties Slip in the 1950s and early '60s. A narrow street between piers in Lower Manhattan where ships were loaded and unloaded, Coenties Slip became a hotbed for artists in the 1950s, attracting abstract painter Ellswoth Kelly, Pop Art pioneer Robert Indiana, sculptor and collagist Lenore Tawney, and others. They "experiment in their illegal warehouse studios"; sourced found materials, including wood from sail masts, for their pieces; and worked at the forefront of pop art and other movements. Despite diverse styles, the artists found a sense of belonging with each other, as the Slip's geographic isolation offered a "release from societal expectations" and "a sociopolitical refuge." Change came in the 1960s with efforts to modernize the Financial District through the "widening of streets the demolition of waterfront piers," leading to the artists' gradual departure. Peiffer vividly traces the community's genesis and makes a detailed and persuasive case for its influence on other "alternative models to conventional city life." It's a gratifying deep dive into New York City art history.
