The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. They often drew inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world's vanguard circle.

People

Frank O'Hara was at the center of the group before his death in 1966. Because of his numerous friendships and his post as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he provided connections between the poets and painters such as Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers (who was O'Hara's lover). There were many joint works and collaborations, particularly between poets such as O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler: Rivers inspired a play by Koch, Koch and Ashbery together wrote the poem "A Postcard to Popeye", Ashbery and Schuyler wrote the novel A Nest of Ninnies, and Schuyler collaborated on an ode with O'Hara, whose portrait was painted by Rivers.

Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Joe Brainard, and Ted Berrigan came to the group from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery were quite different as poets, but they admired each other and had much in common personally: Third Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, 1954; Fourth Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, 1955; Fifth Annual Exhibitions of Painting and Sculpture, 1956 and Sixth New York Artists’ Annual Exhibition, 1957.

Included in the New York School were Bradley Walker Tomlin, Robert Goodnough, Rosemarie Beck, Joan Mitchell, and Philip Guston. Lawrence Calcagno, Nicolas Carone, Nanno de Groot, Beauford Delaney, Lynne Mapp Drexler, Edward Dugmore, Amaranth Ehrenhalt, John Ferren, Perle Fine, Joseph Glasco, Karl Hagedorn, John Hultberg, Albert Kotin, Clarence Major, Knox Martin, Hugh Mesibov, Ray Parker, Misha Reznikoff, Ludwig Sander, Joop Sanders, Louis Schanker, William Scharf, Ethel Schwabacher, Kendall Shaw, Gloria Shapiro, Thomas Sills, Merton Simpson, Hedda Sterne, and Jack Stewart. In addition, painter/sculptors Karel Appel, Claire Falkenstein, Betty Parsons, and Antoni Tàpies are known as members of the New York School.

Galleries

The Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City specializes in 1950s and 1960s New York School art, and exhibits expressionism, geometric abstraction, and painterly abstraction. It most frequently exhibits works in oil and acrylic, as well as sculpture.

Music

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The term also refers to a circle of composers in the 1950s which included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff. Their music influenced the music and events of the Fluxus group, and drew its name from the Abstract Expressionist painters above.

Dance

During the 1960s the Judson Dance Theater located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York City, revolutionized Modern dance. Combining in new ways the idea of Performance art, radical and new Choreography, sound from avant-garde composers, and dancers in collaboration with several New York School Visual artists.

The group of artists that formed Judson Dance Theater are considered the founders of Postmodern dance. The theater grew out of a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied with John Cage. The artists involved with Judson Dance Theater were avant-garde experimenatalists who rejected the confines of ballet technique, vocabulary and theory.

The first Judson concert took place on July 6, 1962, with dance works presented by Steve Paxton, Freddie Herko, David Gordon, Alex and Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Summers, William Davis, and Ruth Emerson. Seminal dance artists that were a part of the Judson Dance Theater include:

David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Aileen Passloff, and Meredith Monk. The years 1962 to 1964 are considered the golden age of the Judson Dance Theater.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s New York School artists collaborated with several other choreographer / dancers including: Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and Paul Taylor.

References

Bibliography

  • Philip Pavia; Natalie Edgar, Club without walls: selection from the Journals of Philip Pavia, New York: Midmarch Arts, 2007.
  • Irving Sandler, ‘’The New York School: the painters & sculptors of the fifties,’’, New York; London: Harper and Row, 1978. ,
  • Irving Sandler, ‘’ The triumph of American painting: a history of abstract expressionism’’, New York; London: Harper and Row, 1977. ,
  • Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.)
  • Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.)
  • Statutes of Liberty, The New York School of Poets, Geoff Ward, Second Edition, 2001.
  • The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, Donald Merriam Allen, 1969.
  • An Anthology of New York Poets, Ron Padgett (ed.) and David Shapiro (ed.), 1970.
  • Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, University of Texas Press, 1977.
  • The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, David Lehman, 1998.
  • Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The New York School, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965.
  • Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, Penguin Books, 1979.
  • Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art : Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1983.
  • Tate Museum page
  • New York School, Art, in Britannica