Tenderly researched ... As the artists found their voices in those drafty illegal lofts, the antics reached a sitcom level, filling The Slip with rich art-world anecdotes and respectful gossip ... Th[e] interpretive mood might be what makes a book about art a not-insubstantial history of Lower Manhattan as well ... Peiffer’s snapshot of this hinge decade in modern art history should be your first port of call.
Marvelous, crisply written ... Peiffer shifts between profiles of each figure and the neighborhood’s rich past, tracking back to the colonial period ... Ms. Peiffer’s chapters on Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana are her best.
Things that burn bright and vanish are easily idealized, but in The Slip...the critic Prudence Peiffer opts for a tricky blend of mythmaking and myth-busting ... The true hero is an environment, an atmosphere—in the parlance of our times, a vibe ... New York is full of center-edge neighborhoods, and the history of its art scene is largely a matter of the edges becoming more (and ultimately too) central. Peiffer’s main point, though, is right: Coenties Slip had seedy glamour to spare, but for most of the fifties and sixties it didn’t feel like Manhattan ... I read these pages with delight and foreboding: delight because Peiffer is a lively storyteller armed with oodles of great material; foreboding because whenever a writer starts making solemn generalizations about place I start rubbing my temples.
Throughout the book’s first half or thereabouts, Peiffer advances her premise by weaving historical facts about the Coenties Slip into the artists’ stories, interjections that sometimes weigh down her narratives’ otherwise ascending arcs ... The Slip performs here most convincingly as the artists’ silent interlocutor and coconspirator—a source of free materials and affordable space—and as a metonymy for the fleeting years and figures that compose the whole of this story.
An intriguing biography ... This well-researched monograph is a love letter to a unique time and place. It will likely appeal to readers interested in modern art or New York City history.