... marvelous ... [Gabriel] is a gifted storyteller and a dogged researcher. She puts these gifts to excellent use in this panoramic take on the 20th century’s American art revolution ... Ninth Street Women masterfully unspools the biographies of its central cast and scores of supporting players, including the critic and starmaker Clement Greenberg, patron Peggy Guggenheim and writer Frank O’Hara. It takes us into their Greenwich Village haunts and hangouts, and it rummages through their relationships, too often fueled by alcohol and dizzying infidelities ... More than a compilation of biographical tales, Gabriel’s book is a reminder of the importance of women to an artistic genre long associated with masculinity. But it is also is a vivid portrait of the very nature of the artist. The stars of the era suffered and sinned as mortals, but their works — and their creative appetites — were otherworldly. Ninth Street Women gets us a just a little bit closer to their galaxy.

Ninth Street Women is supremely gratifying, generous and lush but also tough and precise—in other words, as complicated and capacious as the lives it depicts. The story of New York’s postwar art world has been told many times over, but by wresting the perspective from the boozy, macho brawlers who tended to fixate on themselves and one another, Gabriel has found a way to newly illuminate the milieu and upend its clichés ... There’s so much material roiling in Ninth Street Women, from exalted art criticism to the seamiest, most delicious gossip, that it’s hard to convey even a sliver of its surprises ... 'The stories told in this book might be a reminder that where there is art there is hope,' Gabriel writes in her introduction, but that wan, anodyne sentiment doesn’t do justice to the gorgeous and unsettling narrative that follows; it’s as if once Gabriel got started, the canvas before her opened up new vistas. We should be grateful she yielded to its possibilities.

Recent surveys at the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have paid homage to their accomplishments, and now comes Mary Gabriel’s sweeping and deliciously readable Ninth Street Women ... These artists are material enough for 700-plus pages, but the author also weaves a vivid tapestry of bohemian life in New York as that city was supplanting Paris as the capital of the art world ... Ninth Street Women is like a great, sprawling Russian novel, filled with memorable characters and sharply etched scenes. It’s no mean feat to breathe life into five very different and very brave women, none of whom gave a whit about conventional mores. But Ms. Gabriel fleshes out her portraits with intimate details, astute analyses of the art and good old-fashioned storytelling.

Mary Gabriel’s timely and ambitious new book, Ninth Street Women, provides a multifaceted account of the five odds-defying female artists who travelled from Ninth Street to the Museum of Modern Art and beyond. Gabriel warns at the start that her seven-hundred-page text lacks 'traditional biographical detail'; instead, it is a widely roving group portrait, evoking an entire era and aspiring to explain it ... Fortunately, Gabriel lets the political thesis fade as events take over and the immediacy of these lives becomes all-engrossing ... The development of a culture is deeply consequential, and its story—even a very specialized piece of its story—requires no apologies or augmentation. And this piece of the art-world story happens to be very exciting, as brought to life in the balance of Gabriel’s rich, serious-minded, and (in a good way) sometimes gossipy book ... Giving due weight to these episodes does not gainsay Gabriel’s essential point about our heroines’ strength but, rather, allows them their fears and complexities, and underscores the harsh and sometimes deforming cultural forces they were up against.

...[a] patient, revealing book ... Gabriel’s reliance on primary sources means that she can’t help but recapitulate the distinction between painting and living (if you are a woman). She is aware that this difference is a function of structural misogyny, but she is also fascinated by the results. This means, for example, that these five women’s relationships with men sometimes take precedence over the art in the book. One might wish the balance were different, but Gabriel has a point; it is uneasily instructive, sixty years on, to understand how these women negotiated their dedication to making art, the necessity of making a living, and the question of a relationship (as well as children). There are passages that are extremely moving in their quiet weighing of needs and desires ... Gabriel does not make a meal of it, however. She reports, and passes on. Though she began the book with a tendency to make portentous claims, her tone becomes easier as she progresses ... So much of this book is about continuing. Ninth Street Women ends up being a paean to painterly tenacity, to refusing to calling it quits. These women, summoned in chorus, fix us with their stare: yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do.

...authoritative and enthralling ... Gabriel chooses to trace, in lush, meticulous detail, the lives and careers of five women featured in that show, shifting back and forth between them, revealing their gifts and idiosyncrasies ... Gabriel astutely draws a bright line between Krasner and Elaine de Kooning ... By any metric Gabriel’s accomplishment is formidable. She brings a perspicacity to Ninth Street Women, packing exhaustive research and original reporting into a dense but richly hued narrative. Her execution is essentially perfect ... Art criticism: Gabriel is always incisive but she never trips over exegesis. She keeps her language sophisticated but smooth ... And Ninth Street Women wouldn’t be the landmark work it is without an unflinching appraisal of gender politics. Gabriel plays it fair and square ... Mary Gabriel’s magisterial book clasps each woman by the hand and waltzes her gracefully to center stage.

Gabriel carefully examines these women's personal and professional lives and unique social, creative, and economic struggles, including a wealth of descriptive anecdotes, historical details, and artistic references. Moreover, the author vividly reflects the multifaceted texture of the period's avant-garde community as well as the impact of a changing societal and cultural framework as it moved from the Depression and World War II into the 1950s ... A must for modern art historians and enthusiasts. The exceptional research, based on interviews, archival materials, and a variety of background sources, and thoughtfully selected photographs complement the superbly written and absorbing text.

Gabriel not only provides vibrantly detailed accounts of these five exceptional avant-garde artists’ friendships and rivalries, affairs and marriages, doubt and despair, conviction and resilience; she also establishes a richly dimensional context for their struggles and innovations, delving into the impact on the arts and on women’s lives of the Great Depression, WWII, the atomic bomb, and the Cold War. Gabriel has created an incandescent, engrossing, and paradigm-altering art epic.

Once again, Gabriel has found captivating subjects worthy of her prismatic attention. She uses the stories of artists Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler as a kaleidoscope that both segments and weaves together a comprehensive history of the New York School’s most mythic heroines ... While the art descriptions in Ninth Street Women are visceral and rich, the narrative is more strongly defined by moments of decision, commitment, desperation, and change ... Ninth Street Women is the rare art biography that doesn’t make me feel like I should just give up on being a woman with thoughts about art. While it is diagnostic, it is never prescriptive in its telling of the travails and ultimate courage of these remarkable artists. It’s a valuable contribution to the conversation about the Abstract Expressionists because it succeeds in documenting the way these artists rose together, with no person completely disconnected from the rest of the movement.

Gabriel’s heavy use of firsthand accounts gives the narrative an intimate feel and exposes often painful personal lives, as exemplified by Krasner’s difficult marriage with Jackson Pollock, whose descent into alcoholism and grisly death makes for difficult reading. Through the lens of these women’s lives, Gabriel delivers a sweeping history of abstract expressionism and the postwar New York School, and an affectionate tribute to the underappreciated women of America’s avant-garde.

Drawing on memoirs, more than 200 interviews, a huge trove of archival material, and a wide range of books and articles, Gabriel...has created an ambitious, comprehensive, and impressively detailed history of abstract expressionism ... The author effectively sets her subjects in historical and cultural context ... A sympathetic, authoritative collective biography.

Gabriel investigates the role of several women who were central to the artistic milieu by weaving biography and social history into an engaging and seamless narrative. The result is a book that will expand and enrich understanding of Abstract Expressionism and shine a well-deserved spotlight on a handful of artists who deserve more visibility and recognition for their accomplishments.