Imagine! Painters and Poets of the New York School
Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery
March 19 - May 4, 2007
Monday - Saturday 11 a.m. until 4 p.m.

"The avant-garde atmosphere in New York at that time was a close and exciting one," Grace Hartigan recalled of the beginnings of the New York School. The close association of artists (Hartigan, Larry Rivers, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Goodnough, Fairfield Porter, and Alfred Leslie) and poets (Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest) produced a creative excitement that lasted from the late 1940s into the 1960s.

The painters of the New York School took their inspiration from a group of New York artists that had been exploring the boundaries of abstraction since the late 1930s, especially Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Hartigan described this influence: "In the late 1940s I, along with other students in our twenties, found a new way of painting being created in our New York backyards. Meeting with and seeing the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning changed my life-I understood what it meant to totally identify one's self with one's art." John Ashbery was more cryptic: "We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing."

This identity of self and art makes it impossible to ascribe a "style" to the New York School. Hartigan's style moved back and forth between the figurative and abstraction all through the 1950s; Joan Mitchell was relentlessly abstract, while Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher were clearly figurative. The terms "abstract expressionism" and "action painting" were applied by critics, but Hartigan may be more helpful when she explained that "in the late 40s and early 50s, the painters who came to be known as 'abstract expressionist' wanted to give emotional content to abstract art." This emotional content, to no small degree, was fueled by the connected lives of the artists, who studied together at Hans Hoffman's School, the Artist's Club, and Studio 35, and drank and communed at the Cedar Street Tavern and the Five Spot.

Also central to this creative atmosphere was the collaboration in life and art between artists and poets. Some of the poets of the New York School had studied together at Harvard, but they came together socially and professionally when they gathered around the art scene in New York. Many of the poets had their first work published by John Bernard Myers at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, where most of the painters had their first shows. As Frank O'Hara commented, the poets "divided our time between the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artist's bar, the Cedar Tavern. In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip." There were so many collaborations between the New York School poets and artists, it is hard to keep track of them all. The painters' appreciation of the poetry scene was not unreciprocated. Grace Hartigan, for example, wrote of her admiration of O'Hara's poetry: "His poetry involves a tapestry of ideas, images-the artist's inner sensibility, the observed world, art and poetry of the past & present and modern man's life on 'the edge.'?"

It was a unique time suffused with a vigorous creative fire that we celebrate in Imagine! Painters and Poets of the New York School.