combinations of the two.  The section headings include titles such as Some Versions of Romanticism, The Artist and the Public and The Empirical Imagination. The book is dizzyingly annotated with footnotes consuming the last 63 pages yet this is no Janson’s encyclopedic history of art. With a solid foundation of documented facts Perl’s subjective perspective rounds out the content and is nearly always dead-on correct.

A case in point is his deconstruction of Pop Art and the Duchampian underpinnings supporting it; what he correctly identifies as ‘anti-art’. I’ve touched on this in my writing over the years but have not come close to the depth and skill with which Perl is able to dissect it.  The primary focus is on the poster boys for Pop, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and after observing then slicing through the layers of cool, artifice and posturing that Pop unambiguously conveys, (including its historical debt to Duchamp) what he eventually fleshes out is that the core is hollow. If a primary driver for Pop Art is what you see is what you get, well, what you get isn’t much as it turns out, but Perl explains precisely why this is so.  Part of this includes sideline observations such as how Pop Art has acquired an unintended patina of nostalgia over the years (something I’ve also thought to be true for quite some time).

New Art City concludes with a lengthy, detailed contrast and comparison of an unlikely duo  Donald Judd and Fairfield Porter.  Perl draws out the obvious comparisons such as that both men were critics as well as artists.  But it gets more interesting when he begins to compare their art which on the surface couldn’t seem more different.  The fundamental connection between the two according to the author is that both artists were essentially empiricists in their approach to making art. All of this remains within the broad theme of New York city even as Perl considers Judd’s development of Marfa Texas as an alternative working center and Porter’s time

spent in Maine.  The brilliance in the comparison is how he is able to do so while also using the evaluation to present his larger concept.

You close this book on a melancholy note in part because it seems to end so abruptly (those extra pages of footnotes deceive you as to the book’s length).  But the other part is that you are yanked back to the contemporary New York art scene which, given its hyped-up lugubrious commercial emphasis over the currency of ideas, pales in comparison.  In the end Jed Perl’s book provides those of us with a real stake in modern art a thorough and poignant look back at New York’s glory days along with a thoughtful speculation, indeed reminder, of what we continue to strive for.

Alice Zinnes, Galleria Janet Kurnatowski

As if you couldn’t guess it, Alice Zinnes has been painting landscapes for years; more precisely Pennsylvania landscapes.  Such references are implicitly suggested in these very painterly abstractions which begin with her handling of space.