New York Mid-Century: 1945-1965

"New York Mid-Century, 1945-1965 is the story of how the Big Apple emerged as the cultural capital of the postwar world in art, architecture, design, and the performing arts. It was a period of intense cross-fertilization, as poets and critics mixed with artists, dealers, musicians, designers, architects, actors, dancers, and choreographers. Annie Cohen-Solal, a best-selling author whose books include a biography of kingmaker art dealer Leo Castelli, brings alive the artistic ferment of those years: the legendary galleries and watering holes, the landmark exhibitions and happenings, the influential critics and collectors, and the artists themselves, from Abstract Expressionists Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline, to Color Field artists Frankenthaler, Noland, and Louis, to Johns and Rauschenberg, to Minimalists Judd and Flavin, to Pop Artists Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, and Warhol.^ Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger guides us on a tour of the Modernist masterpieces that gave the city a sleek new profile: Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Le Corbusier and Wallace Harrison's United Nations, Philip Johnson's Four Seasons restaurant and New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at Idlewild Airport, and of course, Lincoln Center, New York's answer to the great piazzas of the world. He also takes us into the swank shops, offices, and apartments of the era, the furnishings designed by Modernist icons from Charles and Ray Eames to Florence Knoll and George Nelson, and he tantalizes us with the work of the pioneering advertising executives, graphic designers, and photographers who gave the period that Mad Men look.^ He concludes the section with a lively recounting of the philosophical battle between the urban planners who believed in tearing down and building anew (the Robert Moses camp) and the preservationists who believed in retaining