A group portrait of artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman, and the street they all called home, Coenties Slip in the 1950s and 1960s.
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.
