Recent Reading: Ninth Street Women

 

The good: you will learn a tremendous amount about abstract expressionism, Greenwich Village NYC from 1939-1956, and a great many people including: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Peggy Guggenheim, Frank O’Hara, Leo Castelli, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and many other people.

The challenge: at 944 pages (701 pages of text), the book is a marathon. I also wish the pictures of the paintings (about 35) were integrated into the text rather than collected all at the end.

If you know nothing about these painters, then I suggest you start with two paintings:

Helen Frankenthaler’s Scene with Nude and

Elaine deKooning’s Portrait of John F. Kennedy.