The good: an amazing overview of one of the most fascinating periods in art history and probably the most fascinating period for American art history. The parties, the paintings, the development of the unique styles.

The bad: the two artists, Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, who were in relationships with other artists (Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, respectively), see their work and career subsumed, even in a book about female artists, into something too much like extensions of the stories of men. Even worse, you can see it happen, because the first part of the book chronicles Krasner work and artistic engagements pre-Pollock and it is incredibly vibrant. Post-Pollock, well, I learned a lot about her husband. Kooning met her future husband early in her story, so she never got the same kind of prologue that Krasnet, at least, enjoyed.

But I am glad to have read it, glad to have learned more about these artists and their milieu. And I am also looking forward to visiting some of their works the next time I visit the museum (the National Gallery of Art, here in Washington, DC, has some admirable works by Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and Hartigan, especially; which, in this context of having just read this, also feels like another slap to Krasner and Kooning; sigh…).