The New York School refers to a sociable coterie of painters and poets at work and play in downtown Manhattan around the midpoint of the 20th century. Used first to describe the abstract expressionists of the 1940s (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and so on), the term subsequently became identified with a younger generation of more figuratively inclined colleagues, among them Jasper Johns, Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as poet friends such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch. In the 1960s, the term expanded again to encompass a third generation springing up around the St Marks Poetry Project, including though by no means limited to Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard.
What the New York School poets and painters held in common, besides shared zip codes, was a convivial interest in each other’s company, conversation and intentions, the last of which might retrospectively be described as taking European modernism, especially abstraction, and reinventing it in a decidedly American lingo and palette.
Gossipy, curious and assured, this atmosphere of friendly convergence inevitably nourished coproduction. Artists painted portraits of poets. Poets wrote profiles of painters. Poems were jointly or communally authored (often on napkins at the legendary Cedar Tavern, while the painters swigged beers and exchanged blows, their rowdy voices leaking into the verses like static, adding to the intimate cacophony and sense of slippage). Small magazines sprang up to publish these outpourings. Some – Folder, say, or Locus Solus – were works of art in themselves, while Fuck You: a magazine of the arts, possessed a scruffiness in keeping with its disreputable title.
Perhaps the most interesting of these collaborative ventures are the hybrid works, fusing the previously singular domains of word and paint by way of what Norman Bluhm described as “a conversation” between disciplines. Among these fertile pairings are Joan Mitchell’s luminous pastels with James Schuyler’s dreamy lines and Guston’s cartoonish scrawl with Clark Coolidge’s stark imagism. Bearing in mind that this mood of generosity and playfulness underpinned even solo pieces, it’s canny of Jenni Quilter to make collaboration the focus of her magnificently lavish, colourful and beautifully designed compendium, which captures the essential spirit of the New York School: its valuing of what people make together as well as what they produce alone.
The book’s subtitle, “Neon in Daylight”, is lifted from O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them”, one of the most famous Lunch Poems in his 1964 collection. O’Hara is undoubtedly the linchpin here, his distinctive grin, hooked nose and widow’s peak surfacing repeatedly from photographs, sculptures and paintings, as befits the man Larry Rivers described as “the central switchboard” of the scene (in return, O’Hara dubbed Rivers “a demented telephone”).
From the moment of his arrival in the city in August 1951, O’Hara was deeply rooted in New York’s art world. His first job was on the information desk of the Museum of Modern Art and, apart from a brief break, he remained at this august institution until the end of his short life, rising to the position of associate curator in the department of painting and sculpture. He organised some of the most important exhibitions of the period, acting as a passionate advocate for the work he loved – much of it made by members of his own circle.
This makes him sound parochial, which he wasn’t, and partisan, which he certainly was. One of the most noticeable things about this prodigiously talented man is the sheer intensity of his involvement in other people’s lives. He was forever cajoling, provoking and pummelling those around him into producing work. As Rivers put it in his eulogy for O’Hara, who was killed by a beach taxi on Fire Island at the age of 40: “There were at least 60 people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend … At one time or another he was everyone’s greatest and most loyal audience.” “The frightening amount of energy he invested in our art and our lives often made me feel like a miser,” Katz added, while the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby described him as “everybody’s catalyst”.
In the midst of all this, he managed, apparently effortlessly, to produce about 700 poems of his own that remain as original and lovely as anything of his century. O’Hara’s work has a deceptive casualness about it. Lunch Poems catches him in the act of loitering in the city, speaking himself onto the page while drinking chocolate malteds and buying magazines. His writing, as Koch has elsewhere observed, is stuffed with quotidian objects, among them “jujubes, aspirin tablets, Good Teeth buttons, and water pistols, most of which had not appeared in poetry before”.
This desire to extend boundaries, to let the air out of pompous and sentimental notions about what constitutes art or authenticity, is a common, shared impulse here. Many of the works celebrated are self-consciously airy, deliberately light, designed for audiences of amused friends. Take a jaunty collaborative painting by George Schneeman and Padgett from the 1970s of a man riding a giant cockerel, embellished with the words “Shit on You”. Exquisitely coloured (Schneeman emerges from these pages a tonal virtuoso) and gleefully crude, it risks, as Quilter points out, “being dismissed as scatological absurdity”, and with that risk keeps ajar the door of possibility.
Even the weightier works maintain an atmosphere of zero gravity. One ofthe masterpieces is Porter’s extraordinary 1957-58 portrait of the poets Ashbery and Schuyler, perched on a floral sofa against an indeterminate creamy background. Porter, that strange, abrupt, observant man, had a knack for keeping the objects in his paintings separate. Schuyler and Ashbery maintain a courteous, unsettled distance from one another. Though they’re both unequivocally present in the light-filled room, they aren’t in anything like the sweaty contact of normality. Schuyler appears to be floating an inch or two above the cushions, his legs sticking into the air like those of a blow-up doll, a world away from the man whose tense and unhappy form is superimposed over his left foot.
This radical disjunction between things, this art of objects and the spaces between them, is key to the New York School aesthetic. It’s there in John’s assemblages and Rivers’s insistently inchoate paintings, with their marshy palettes. Disjunction is at the heart of O’Hara and Ashbery’s surreal wordplay, their shearing away of the humble zips and buttons of language. It’s central, likewise, to Katz’s hyper-real, dissociated portraits, his flat slabs of pastel colour brushed with light, and to Brainard’s joyful collages and cutups.
Brainard, whose congeniality and lack of arrogance made him both a natural collaborator and less well known than his work deserves, appears here as an unmistakable star. His intricate creations often riff around found objects or popular art, especially comics; witty, vivid and oddly modest, they possess a near-painful delicacy and coherence. A black-and-white photograph from 1975 shows him islanded in his loft on Greene Street, the floor almost completely covered by drawings. A writer as well as artist, whose quasi-autobiography I Remember (recently reissued by Notting Hill Editions) is one of the most engaging books 20th-century poetics produced, he died of Aids-related pneumonia at the age of 52. By that time he’d already retreated from art-making, though not from the collaborative friendships he’d maintained since boyhood.
If there’s a single quibble, it’s the absence of an index, which makes navigating the scenes of intimacy in search of a single name laborious. But no one could describe tacking back and forth between these letters, essays and paintings as anything but an act of pleasure. Though the sleek production suggests a coffee-table volume, the material inside has lost none of its spontaneity, its mess and zip. “Collaborative art makes art, in general, seem more possible,” Quilter observes in her conclusion, and it is possibility that crackles from these pages: a sense of abundance and invitation that is all too often stripped from art.
• Olivia Laing is the author of The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (Canongate, £9.99). To order New York School Painters & Poets go to rizzoliusa.com.
