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The Art Dealer's Apprentice tells the story of how the author moved to New York in 1989 as a young Midwesterner, found a job at an Upper East Side gallery, and became the protégé of Carla Panicali, an Italian countess and major international art world figure. From Carla – an extraordinary woman whom he deeply admired – the author learned to navigate the treacherous waters of authenticity, power and money in the art business and his own life. As gallery director, he gradually piloted the gallery through a sea of fakes, frauds, and unscrupulous colleagues, competitors, collectors and experts, until the art market crashed, and in the ensuing crisis, in the increasingly money-driven art world of the 1990s, he came to question even the authenticity of his friendship with Carla.In The Art Dealer's Apprentice, the author recounts how he learned the New York art business from the inside, including the roles of dealers, auction houses, runners, collectors and experts; the personal histories of famous artists and the art historical importance and salability of their work; and how paintings and sculptures were (or were not) authenticated and sold, often based, surprisingly, on factors having little to do with the artwork itself. The author also details how international business was done, in some cases through illicit transport of artworks, payoffs to experts, and Swiss bank accounts. Increasingly disillusioned, the author ultimately concludes that by the early 1990s, the art business was no longer really about art.

This volume focuses on Jewish American identity within the context of Pop art in New York City during the sixties to reveal the multivalent identities and selves often ignored in Pop scholarship. Melissa L. Mednicov establishes her study within the context of prominent Jewish artists, dealers, institutions, and collectors in New York City in the Pop sixties. Mednicov incorporates the historiography of Jewish identity in Pop art—the ways by which identity is named or silenced—to better understand how Pop art made, or marked, different modes of identity in the sixties. By looking at a nexus of the art world in this period and the ways in which Jewish identity was registered or negated, Mednicov is able to further consider questions about the ways mass culture influenced Pop art and its participants—and, to a larger extent, formed further modes of identity.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Jewish studies, and American studies.

A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of Vogue's Best Books of the YearA dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York“The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.” ―Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street WomenAt the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew―and left her mark on―the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions.Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments--from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg―comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world.Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.

A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in the nineteenth centuryFrom the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at mid-century. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered and sold to its trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director. The third escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday—the only day when working people were able to attend.In chronicling these disputes, Rachel N. Klein considers cultural fissures that ran much deeper than the specific complaints that landed protagonists in court. New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions came under intense scrutiny not only because Americans invested them with moral and civic consequences but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of working people. Art Wars examines popular engagement with New York's art institutions and illuminates the changing cultural role of art exhibition over the course of the nineteenth century.

A rollicking account of a celebrated artist's coming of age, full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, fantastically good music, and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum, and featuring cameos from David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and many more.“A phantasmagoria of alcohol, sex, art, conversation, glam rock, and New Wave cinema. Hannah's writing combines self-aware humor with an intoxicating punk energy.” —The New YorkerPainter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade, Twentieth-Century Boy is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place.

Pop Art — an entirely new and defiantly American style of painting and sculpture — was all the rage among the cultural cognoscenti in the turbulent 1960s, and New York City was the unquestioned epicenter of Pop Art. No artist embodies this groundbreaking movement more than Roy Lichtenstein, the only Pop Artist born in the city and whose life and experiences there inspired much of his most popular and iconic work.This book looks at Lichtenstein's life through the lens of New York City, taking the reader to the Manhattan that Lichtenstein knew, from the Prohibition era through the postwar era and countercultural revolution to the well-heeled iconoclasm of the 80s and 90s. It is a fascinating biography of a major but sometimes neglected trailblazer of 20th-centruy American art.