Ninth Street Women, Mary Gabriel
Ninth Street Women, Mary Gabriel
6 Rating(s)
List: $49.99 | Sale: $35.00
Club: $24.99

Ninth Street Women
Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art

Author: Mary Gabriel

Narrator: Lisa Stathoplos

Unabridged: 39 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/19/2019


Synopsis

Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times).

Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.

Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life.

Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey

”All artists succumb to self-doubt; it is the handmaiden of creation. For a woman, however, whether in Virginia Woolf’s early twentieth-century England or Joan Mitchell’s 1950’s New York, that doubt would have been the result of forces both creative and social. Of the latter, Woolf wrote, ’The indif......more

Goodreads review by Doria

More than just a fabulous five-way biography of five extraordinary artists, this is also the biography of a place and time and an art movement, a way of life, and a community. Mary Gabriel has fleshed out the story of the artists of the New York School, centering on their heyday during the 40s and 5......more

Goodreads review by Evi

For a book that was about women artists, I read a lot about male artists. I was craving insight into the minds of these wonderful abstract expressionists: what inspired them, how did they develop, when did they find their style. All of this was muddled with constant anecdotes on tertiary, if not com......more

Goodreads review by Shelley

DNF. I read up to chapter 26 (of 42) and then skipped ahead to the epilogue. I picked this up from a podcast rec and did not expect it to be 950(!) pages long. I've noticed the absence of female artists in discussions about art and art history, so a part of me really wanted this book to succeed. Unf......more