In this landmark work, Jed Perl captures the excitement of a generation of legendary artists–Jackson Pollack, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly among them–who came to New York, mingled in its lofts and bars, and revolutionized American art. In a continuously arresting narrative, Perl also portrays such less well known figures as the galvanic teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan Mitchell, and the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, as well the writers, critics, and patrons who rounded out the artists’world. Brilliantly describing the intellectual crosscurrents of the time as well as the genius of dozens of artists, New Art City is indispensable for lovers of modern art and culture. “Exemplary....focuses not only upon the major figures of ascendant movements but also upon how a variety of independent-minded artists, energized by the vitality of the mid-century exchange of ideas, found individual means of expression."— The Washington Post Book World “The sort of grand marriage of criticism, history and biography that Edmund Wilson achieved in his finest books. . . . A thrilling achievement.” — The Atlantic Monthly “Bound to stand as the definitive volume on this hectic and fertile period in American art for years to come.”— Art News "Fascinating . . . by far the most thorough account of the ‘triumph of American painting’ that we have. . . . A splendid achievement and an exceptionally worthwhile read." — The Christian Science Monitor "Shows the incisiveness and pluck of George Bernard Shaw writing about music or Pauline Kael reviewing movies. . . . Opens onto new surprises at every turn."— San Francisco Chronicle “Few people write about art as beautifully, one might say as tenderly, as Jed Perl.” — The Wall Street Journal Jed Perl was born in New York City in 1951. He received a BA from Columbia College and studied painting at the Skowhegan School in Maine. He was a contributing editor to Vogue in the 1980s and has been the art critic for The New Republic since 1994. Among his books are Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I and Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis . He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter Deborah Rosenthal. THE PAINTER AND THE CITY I “Mitcha, why aren’t you home painting?” This was what Hans Hofmann said to Joan Mitchell when he saw her out walking her dog early one morning in the paint-happy 1950s. Hofmann was in his seventies and Mitchell was turning thirty. She had studied with him briefly, in the school he had run in Manhattan since 1933. And like so many other artists of her day, she had felt the casually messianic impact of this man who was thickly built, with a large, powerful head and an orator’s way of using his arms and hands to underscore a dramatic point. In the 1950s Hofmann and his wife, Miz, were living in a fifth-floor walk-up on Fourteenth Street, not far from his school, which was on Eighth Street, and Mitchell worked in several studios in the neighborhood. Hofmann and Mitchell would run into each other in Washington Square Park, that patch of green dominated by the famous triumphal arch, and all around them Was Greenwich Village, with its extraordinary cache of nineteenth-century domestic architecture and its occasional modern storefronts and its faded fascination. The Washington Square of Henry James’s story, with its Old New York gentility, had vanished long ago. For half a century the neighborhood had been home to bohemians who placed their hopes in socialism or in art-for-art’s-sake, and by now the artists and writers sometimes seemed to be outnumbered by the tourists in search of a glimpse of the vie de bohème. All of this was an amazingly comfortable backdrop for Hofmann and Mitchell and their friends, who walked along those familiar Village streets, immersed in their own glorious reimaginings of art and life and New York City, secure in the knowledge that they would make everything new. Hofmann, a painter and teacher who laid out the principles of modern art in a sometimes nearly impenetrable German accent, could have been Mitchell’s grandfather. He could have been a father to Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, artists who had already racked up achievements that left Mitchell and her young friends awestruck. And yet there was an agelessness about Hofmann. Rudi Blesh, a writer who was as interested in ragtime and jazz as he was in the new American painting, observed that Hofmann “paints spontaneously with fury that is a real fury even if it is cheerful rather than grim.” For painters and sculptors of Mitchell’s generation, who listened to Hofmann in his school or on a street corner or at a gallery opening, it was almost incredible to imagine how far he had traveled. And now Hofmann’s rich and varied life—which had begun in Bavaria in 1880 and had included long periods in two of the great European cities—was coming to a climax in New York in the mid-century years, when the m