THE SLIP

A fond portrait of a thriving community dedicated to nurturing art.

Art historian Peiffer, managing editor of the creative team at the Museum of Modern Art, makes her book debut with an appreciative group biography of a community of artists who lived and worked in cheap lofts and studios on Coenties Slip, at the lower tip of Manhattan, from 1956 to 1967. Ranging in age from 24 to 50, the artists were at the beginnings of their careers, eager to find their place in an art world dominated by abstract expressionism. Some—Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman—had studied in Paris, where they met major artists, including Jean Arp, Brancusi, Giacometti, Braque, and Calder. While they felt they were learning a lot, they were frustrated that their own art was hardly being seen. Others came to the Slip from all over the country. In 1957, Agnes Martin arrived by bus from New Mexico and soon became “the mercurial den mother of the Slip.” Lenore Tawney, a wealthy 50-year-old widow, came from Chicago the same year. Slip residents included Robert Indiana (he changed his surname to honor his home state); James Rosenquist; and Youngerman’s wife, actor Delphine Seyrig. Peiffer chronicles each artist’s career, tracing webs of influence as well as the gallery owners and art critics who promoted their work. Besides illuminating the creative work, the author captures the spirit of the “unique microcosm” of the “modest, almost forgotten” Slip, “an alley dead-ending in shipworm- and gribbles-infested piers” that once was a site of New York’s bustling harbor trade. By the 1950s, though, its streets were dilapidated, and abandoned lofts had fallen into disrepair. Still, the area seemed like a refuge from the commercialism of uptown Manhattan. “The Slip,” Peiffer writes, “offered a release from societal expectations but also community; its siting as a sociopolitical refuge is a part of how we can think about collective solitude. Its isolation allowed for that community to be self-selecting.”

A warm evocation of a unique place and time.