Volume 52, Number 18 · November 17, 2005
The Man Who Came to Dinner
By Mark Ford
Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951–1991
edited by William Corbett
Turtle Point, 470 pp., $21.95 (paper)
Material Witness: The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter
edited by Ted Leigh, with an introduction by David Lehman and additional notes by Justin Spring
University of Michigan Press, 350 pp., $35.00
The poet James Schuyler (1923– 1991) and the painter Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) met in 1952. Abstract Expressionism was at its most triumphant and seemingly irresistible, with New York poised to supplant Paris as the epicenter of modern art. The experiments of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning were beginning to influence those working in other art forms too: 'New York poets,' Schuyler once observed, 'except I suppose the color-blind, are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.'
Review, 4047 words
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