Book Review: Ninth Street Women
Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art is a book that aims high. It attempts to place these women into their rightful place in art history, while also explaining the circumstances that existed at the time.
Promised as the stories of 5 women painters somewhat overlooked by history, this book delivers and yet it doesn’t.
Part of the issue is that the structure doesn’t lend itself to their stories. If written chronologically, the entire first half of the book is about Lee Krasner, as she was quite a bit older than the others. If you write about their stories concurrently, it doesn’t make sense chronologically.
I really wanted to like this book, and I did, to a point.
A real strength of this book is that writing about lesser known but equally deserving artists is a service to our culture and history. This book is painstakingly researched, with many anecdotes and minutiae included to really bring the times alive. It was exciting to read how the artists progressed in developing their art and the obstacles they faced. The time between the two World Wars was a dynamic era, with many societal and cultural norms changed or outright erased. The fear that many in the United States felt about a realistic end of the world through nuclear war is brought up and explains why many artists felt and created in the manner that they did.
However, there are some negatives to this book as well. It is a HUGE book, to the point of it being uncomfortable to read. You can’t hold it and, until you reach the middle of the pages, it feels physically lopsided. While explaining the times is necessary, there is way too much information that added to an explanation of the times, but not so much to the stories of the women themselves. Another shortcoming is that this book is supposed to be about women artists, but it seems even more so about the men in their lives. If I wanted to read a Pollock biography I would have picked up a Pollock biography. And, for a book that celebrates women, why the emphasis on what they wore and their breast size? Did I mention there is WAY too much extraneous information?
The editor(s) failed in reining in the author. It seemed that every bit of research the author did was included in the book. Truthfully, this book feels less like an art history tome and more like a doctoral dissertation that was printed as-is. Painstakingly researched but not edited to the level of a true accounting of the art history of the period, chopping out most of the pages regarding the male artists, anything having to do with their clothing, their makeup, and the like, would have vastly improved this tome and made for even better reading.
Recommended reading - who knows? maybe you’ll be a reader who truly enjoys all the little tidbits that are included.
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, NY, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018