How does specificity of place play a role in art, enough to become more figure than ground, less a context than a character? This is one of the larger questions framing art historian Prudence Peiffer’s momentous new survey The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever. The book vividly documents a moment in the 1950s and ’60s when a cast of artists settled, at staggered intervals, in a three-block area around Coenties Slip, a street on Manhattan’s lower tip. Coenties Slip borrowed its name from one of the “slips”—inlets for the docking and repairing of boats—that once cut sharply into New York’s downtown waterfront, facilitating the busy circulation of fish, freight, and sailors between land and sea. While New York’s status as a maritime trading hub lured fleets of boats, it was the skeletal remains of that activity, by then sharply diminished, that drew artists to Coenties Slip. In place of industry, they found vast and vacant loft spaces, cheap to rent, in which they could both work and live (illegally, owing to zoning laws).
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Peiffer’s book arrives nearly 50 years after the earliest attempt to honor the Slip: the 1974 exhibition “Nine Artists/Coenties Slip,” organized for an old downtown branch of the Whitney Museum on Water Street nearby. The exhibition showcased lesser-known inhabitants of the Slip, including Fred Mitchell (the first to settle there), Ann Wilson, and Charles Hinman, as well as the area’s luminaries of postwar American art: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. The exhibition represented an important salvage operation at the time: by the early ’70s, nearly all the lofts that had housed these artists had been razed to make way for corporate development, demolition having begun not long after the first artists arrived.
In the decades since, scholarship on individual figures has revealed, in glints and fragments, how their practices evolved during their tenure at Coenties Slip. But efforts toward a more comprehensive understanding of the Slip’s quietly consequential settlement have been rare. At the outset of her book, Peiffer proffers a reason why. “The artists [on the Slip] never formed a movement or a school or even a mythic following en masse,” she writes. And elsewhere: “[T]heir work was often difficult to fit into any one movement, and its reach not always equal.”
Taken together as a network or community, the Slip artists short-circuited the conventional organizing schemes of art history and criticism in which it often seems that, as Peiffer writes, “movement only happened in movements.” For Peiffer, this challenge, far from a deterrent, occasions the telling of a new story with a fresh historiographic approach. As she asks, “What if we thought about groups in art history based … on shared places? What if, rather than technique or style, it’s a spirit of place that defines a crucial moment?”
The Slip is what Peiffer calls a “group biography” that traces the activities of Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Rosenquist, Tawney, Youngerman, and actress Delphine Seyrig. (Seyrig, best-known for her role in Last Year at Marienbad, was married to Youngerman.) More significantly, though, it is a biography of a particular place at a particular time that makes sense of what an assembly of artists found in their “modest, almost forgotten” environment.
Drawn to New York for a variety of reasons—the promise of gallery representation, the prospect of a fresh start— the artists central to the book converged upon the Slip with an eye for low rent (which hovered around $45 a month) and ample floorspace. They worked in different mediums in the service of different muses, but they found themselves living in close proximity in just a handful of squat buildings, and lounging among the same sycamore and gingko trees of nearby Jeanette Park.
Peiffer starts with individual portraits of the artists at play before moving on to a more engrossing core in which she documents relationships (friendly and romantic), passing encounters, and exchanges of influence among them, showing all the while how they drew on the Slip’s rarefied atmosphere and sedimented histories in highly personal but compatible ways. What she emphasizes most is the quality of separation that the area afforded those who lived there.
By the time of their arrival, the Slip’s 18th- and 19th-century history as one of the “loudest, busiest spots in the city”—a panorama of loading carts, unruly barrooms, and buzzing markets, presided over by a forest of ship masts—was firmly in the past. As Peiffer recounts in painstakingly researched dispatches of urban history, the Slip’s namesake waterway had long been filled in, warehouses had been vacated, and, except for the Fulton Fish Market on South Street (still busy in the mornings), the only locus of activity was nearby Wall Street. The Slip was deserted at night, providing its artists an exquisite quiet in which they could commit themselves to focused work.
It was also small enough to facilitate intimate interaction and the forging of something like community. Peiffer refers to a sense of “collective solitude” when discussing the Slip’s dual opportunities for restorative isolation and small but significant moments of connection: lunches, river walks, and gatherings on the loft buildings’ low roofs. For the gay inhabitants of the Slip (Kelly, Indiana, and Martin), this solitude and openness also accommodated modes of living and loving unsanctioned in the chilled social climate of much of the rest of the city.
Peiffer suggests that this same quality of separateness distanced the Slip artists from the influence of Abstract Expressionism, still alive in the gallery circuit and the public eye. While establishing themselves and cultivating their formal vocabularies, many of the artists on the Slip were consciously working to break beyond Ab-Ex’s existentialist anguish and the movement’s notion of creation as a highly personal exercise or exorcism.
Kelly and Youngerman—who, prior to arriving at the Slip, had previously bonded in Paris over their disinterest in what was “happening in America” (Peiffer covers this episode early in The Slip, in a marvelous “French prelude”)—were each formulating approaches to painted abstraction that could not be further from Jackson Pollock’s splatter. In Paris and then New York, Kelly refined an approach to “anti-composition” wherein he plucked “already-made” images from his immediate environment—a slant of light across water, the curl of an orange peel, the curve of a bridge— and used them as the basis for his works. While more sympathetic to the Ab-Ex stars, Martin honed a more ascetic, serene, and egoless approach to painting. And in a rejection of the movement’s invocations of myth and timeless universals, Indiana and Rosenquist came to embrace commercial imagery, roadside iconography, and current events flashing across TV screens: the manic flux of the present.
Peiffer also helps us see how, despite their stylistic and philosophical differences, the Slip artists tracked traces of their environment into the work they produced while living there. She decodes the local color in Kelly’s buoyant abstractions, tethering the sunbursts of his Yellow with Red (1958) to the Knickerbocker beer sign outside 25 Coenties Slip (Indiana’s studio). She reminds us that Tawney produced her career-defining Dark River (1962)—a 14-foothigh length of woven linen and wool that, suspended from the ceiling, does not so much hang as pour down—while the East River murmured outside her window at 25 South Street. And she recounts how during his first years on the Slip, Indiana took advantage of the postindustrial decay and demolitions in his midst, salvaging wood (including beams from sail masts), discarded bicycle wheels, and other scrap for use in early sculptural constructions.
Meanwhile, Indiana’s discovery of die-cut stencils left behind in his and Tawney’s lofts pressed him toward the use of letters and numbers in his paintings (thus setting him on a path that led him, several years later, to stack the letters L-O-V-E in an indelible graphic arrangement). As Peiffer perceptively observes, while none of the artists on the Slip (except Tawney) had practiced sculpture prior to their arrival, the neighborhood’s abundant material resources made the impulse toward assemblage contagious—so much so that even the focused painter Martin cobbled together austere constructions from nails, buttons, planks, and wire.
Peiffer’s account succeeds, in part, because of the intimate scale of its analysis. As she winds between the hybrid studio-residences on the Slip and along the waterfront, making necessary trips uptown to document her protagonists’ increasing visibility in exhibitions at MoMA and the Betty Parsons Gallery (a former Ab-Ex hub, and an early outlet for several Slip artists), she attends, always, to small moments: breakfasts of blueberry muffins (cooked by Martin), loft parties lubricated by scotch, and moments of rooftop reverie.
The author also convinces us that these moments, which slide between the cracks of conventional art historical narratives, are of utmost significance. The most moving passages in The Slip track pairs of artists entwined by circumstance and elective affinities. One key chapter reconstructs the circuit of mutual support (and possibly romance) that bound Tawney and Martin, who shared ideas (the writings of Teresa of Ávila, Zen philosophy) as they worked toward parallel breakthroughs: for Martin, the organizing form of the grid, and for Tawney, the controlled disruption of her weavings’ even spacing, which enabled her creation of unconventionally shaped “woven forms.” A later chapter finds Indiana and Rosenquist wrestling differently with the promise of the “American dream” before and after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The serene separateness Peiffer conjures in The Slip occasionally comes at the expense of important outward connections; for example, the influence of John Cage, whose embrace of “chance operations” in musical composition and rejection of Ab-Ex’s egotism loomed large in New York circa 1960, is undertheorized, especially given his influence on Martin and Kelly. But one can easily forgive such small elisions in so thorough and generous an overview.
As a model of place-based and locally scaled art history, The Slip is without close parallel or equal in the present. It does call to mind, however, a book from 1993: Sally Banes’s Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Banes’s book, which hops between Fluxus, Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, and Judson Dance Theater in its exploration of the Village in the early ’60s, documents communal modes of living and working at the moment when the loft became the artist’s ideal quarters for life and work.
Banes surveys the writings of activist Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, argued for the preservation and repurposing of old buildings; and it is with Jacobs’s writings—and the 1964 amendment to New York City zoning law that permitted artists to occupy so-called live/work spaces— that Peiffer ends The Slip. As she explains, these changes in law and philosophy arrived too late to save the lofts along the Slip, which her artists had been so prescient to inhabit in the first place. Outrunning demolition and the ambitious redevelopment efforts of David Rockefeller and Robert Moses, the Slip artists left one by one over the course of the ’60s.
But the artists who departed were not the same as when they arrived. Together, they had changed, moving from relative obscurity and youthful experimentation into a place of visibility and confidence. The Slip salvages their stories of change, and it allows us to see how the legacy of the Slip figured into postwar abstraction, fiber art, Pop Art, and Minimalism, leaving few developments in American art untouched by the small street’s ocean spray.