Prudence Peiffer, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever

Reviewed By Miriam Grotte-Jacobs

The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
by Prudence Peiffer
Harper Collins Publishers
August 2023, 432 pp.

As Prudence Peiffer writes in her expansive new book, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, “place is a tricky protagonist.” [1] Peiffer is acknowledging the challenge of how to account for the complexity and breadth of artistic innovation when demarcated by a specific site, at a distinct historical moment, by a heterogeneous group of makers whose artistic motivations can simultaneously coexist, intertwine, and diverge in patterns of constant fluctuation, defying easy categorization. Narrowing her focus to a particularly generative decade or so on Coenties Slip, a waterfront wedge of land along Manhattan’s southeastern edge, Peiffer bookends her study with the years 1954 through 1965, tracking a postwar migration to New York for a small group of mostly American artists—including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman—that lived as a foil to the Abstract Expressionists assembling further north in the city, those that traded in what Clement Greenberg characterized as the “Tenth Street touch.” [2] Immortalized by writers like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, the Slip dates back to the seventeenth century, a liminal site between land and water that maintained, as Peiffer argues, an altogether distinct sensibility; a place apart from the rest of Manhattan that offered artistic alternatives to its inhabitants with major consequences for the trajectory of modernism and postmodernism in the United States. A counternarrative to accounts of the New York art world that center around Cedar Tavern and Max’s Kansas City, Peiffer offers a close reading of a different New York and the artistic community it enabled.

The author does not explicitly engage the broader disciplinary conversation about artistic geography in which her book participates; however, Peiffer’s contribution is an important one to a growing interest — especially in the field of American modernism — in excavating regional art histories to acknowledge the wide-ranging scope of cultural production that proliferated across the country in its lesser-known corners. Peiffer joins a growing list of scholars invested in more site-specific art histories of the postwar period, such as those who examine the explosion of creativity at Black Mountain College, the rich legacy of the Louisville Art Workshop, and the rise of a distinct abstract vocabulary in the hands of artists living the nation’s capital, loosely categorized as the Washington Color School. [3] The perpetual challenge of these studies is how to properly weave the threads of commonality and alignment among makers together without collapsing their crucial differences and flattening the instability of each’s relationship to place, on both personal and artistic levels.

For her part, Peiffer theorizes a model of what she calls “collective solitude” that defined life on the Slip for its inhabitants. [4] The author proposes a dialectical model of proximity and distance in which the Slip enabled productive engagements to flourish alongside the artists’ friendships, romantic relationships, and daily comings and goings in shared live-work spaces, yet also preserved a measure of solitude for artistic labor, with enough space for retreat and isolation—from one another and from the powerful art scene churning uptown. As Peiffer writes, the Slip artists shared a “communal isolation;” they were alone together, so to speak, and shared an artistic sensibility and material environment that fostered their creativity. [5] Driven by love, inspiration, resentment, and rivalry — such as Indiana’s incorporation of text into his work as a partial rebuke to his former partner, Kelly — each Slip artist absorbed the others’ successes and failures and staked their own claims against them.

Organized chronologically and roughly monographically across four parts (given the proximity of the book’s main subjects, they continually appear in each other’s stories, an effect that reinforces their interconnectedness), Peiffer’s book offers new insights into this group of well-known figures by highlighting visual emblems drawn from their shared home on the Slip. Take, for example, the prevalence of the ginkgo leaf in works by Indiana, especially in a breakthrough work like The Sweet Mystery (1959–1962), an early instance of the artist’s introduction of text into his hard-edged abstract pictorial compositions, inspired by the ginkgo trees that populated Jeannette Park, a nearby tract on the waterfront edge of Coenties Slip. The multisensory experience of the shape, color, and smell of the trees’ leaves and fruit permeated the minds of the neighborhood’s inhabitants who frequently visited the park, providing a generative motif tied to place and the relationships it enabled. As Peiffer points out, it is hard not to read the doubled ginkgo leaf in The Sweet Mystery as a gesture towards Indiana’s relationship with Kelly (the two artists often visited the park together), the blaring orange “danger stripes” at the painting’s top and bottom edges signaling an urgent warning against the sentiment generated by the love song referenced by the painting’s text. [6]

Other artistic relationships also emerge anew from Peiffer’s study, such as the engagement between Martin and Chryssa, a Greek artist who arrived in New York in the late 1950s by way of Paris and California and established herself as a leading light artist, though her oeuvre fell into obscurity in recent decades and has only recently begun to re-emerge. The two women became romantically involved at an especially experimental period in Martin’s career, when she began exploring assemblage using materials scavenged from the surrounding Manhattan development boom (a practice she shared with many Slip artists). Working with found objects like wood planks, drawer pulls, wire, bottle caps, and boat spikes in works such as The Garden (1958), The Laws (1958), and the notably titled Homage to Greece (1959), Martin begins to develop the grid format for which her paintings would become best known, using three dimensions saturated with heavy material presence instead of the quiet serenity of her later two-dimensional graphite compositions. That she conducted this exploration alongside an affinity with Chryssa, who was then creating small reliefs and her Newspaper works from metal printing plates, which also relied on a gridded format, reveals the richness of their artistic engagement enabled by Martin’s studio on the Slip, even as the precise nature of the relationship between the two women remains largely undocumented. This is a particular strength of Peiffer’s book; it offers novel entry points to consider indirect and alternative models of artistic collaboration within a community.

As these examples reveal, and the author emphasizes, the Slip functioned as a retreat for its residents in another crucial way—as a safe haven for the group of mostly queer artists at a time when anti-gay policing, legislation, and sentiment were the norm in New York City. The remote location of the Slip contributed to the cover it provided; especially protective for single, unmarried women like Martin and Tawney who lived against the grain of cultural norms of 1950s America. Throughout her book, Peiffer succeeds in weaving a focused art historical narrative against the broader social, political, and industrial history of Manhattan, rooting a moment in American modernism in the material and cultural conditions of rapidly changing geographical and urban space.

Racial dynamics are largely unexplored by Peiffer’s text, a notable gap in light of the group of white artists that forms the book’s focal point and the complex history of the Slip’s (and Manhattan’s) development, built by the labor of enslaved people. Gordon Parks makes a brief, anecdotal appearance in the book as a friend to Seyrig who “opened up a whole other side of New York City,” but otherwise, Black artists are mostly absent, perhaps an indication of more problematic aspects of the Slip’s insularity (and the city’s entrenched racial segregation) that would benefit from explicit discussion. [7]

In the end, Peiffer succeeds in her task and provides a nuanced account of a dynamic artistic network that has not, until now, received focused scholarly treatment. She animates life on the Slip for her reader with stories of chance meetings, evening parties, and family life, bolstered by compelling visual readings of archival photographs that reveal the absolute overlay of art and life within the waterfront lofts. The energy of her prose and her decision to omit numbered footnotes in the main text propel her narrative forward, though scholars may find this strategy frustrating at times. Beyond the history of the Slip, Peiffer offers a fascinating meditation on the notion of artistic community, and how place shapes us into who we are and what we make.

Miriam Grotte-Jacobs received her Ph.D. in art history from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where she specialized in postwar American art. Her research explores the art world of mid- century Washington, D.C., focusing primarily on artists associated with the so-called Washington Color School and the interconnected social, political, and institutional histories of the nation’s capital. She currently works in the department of public programs at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She previously held positions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and D’Amelio Terras Gallery in New York.

[1] Prudence Peiffer, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever (New York, Harper, 2023), 333.

[2] Clement Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 194.

[3] See, for example, Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Helen Molesworth and Ruth Erickson, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957 (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2015); Sarah Battle, “An Oral History Project: The Black Artistic Community in Louisville, Kentucky, 1950s–1970s,” Members’ Reports 42, June 2021–May 2022, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, https://www.nga.gov/research/casva/publications/center-report/center-42/members-reports/sarah-battle.html, accessed October 6, 2023; and Seth Feman and Jonathan Frederick Walz, eds., Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful (Columbus: The Columbus Museum/Yale University Press, 2021), and ongoing work by this author, among others.

[4] Peiffer, xix; 333-334.

[5] Ibid., 335.

[6] Ibid., 110.

[7] Ibid., 154.