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Title: Not Bad, but not Great
Review: This book was an OK read, not a bad book, but nothing spectacular either. The writing seemed to drone on without any real punch and it never did foster any real excitement for the evolving story of New York as the center of the art world. The book misses a great opportunity to do something significant with an interesting subject. It mostly felt like a narrative of events punctuated by passages of overwrought artspeak. The word "dialectic" was used much too many times.When I finished the book I'm not sure what I read. The only new insights that I developed from the book came from the discussion about Fairfield Porter.The book suffers from being published at about the same time as the much more captivating Stevens & Swans' "De Kooning: An American Master" which covers much of the same ground but is a more interesting read.
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