Book Review: The Loft Generation

 

The Loft Generation

From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011

by Edith Schloss

Pub Date 16 Nov 2021 | 

 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

 Biographies & Memoirs 

I am reviewing a copy of The Loft Generation through Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley:

Edith Schloss could not decide if she was a painter who wrote, or a writer she painted.  She was an accomplished writer who wrote many art reviews and memoirs about different people and events throughout her life.  She also had at least one unpublished novel.  When she passed away she left many manuscripts in various stages of completion.  The Loft Generation was an early draft.

In The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly is a firsthand account by an artist at the center of a landmark era in American art. Edith Schloss writes about the artists, poets, and musicians who were part of the postwar art movements as well as about her life as an artist in America and Later in Italy, where she continued to paint and write until her death in 2011.

Edith Schloss was born in Germany, and moved to New York City during World War II.   She soon She became part of a thriving community of artists and intellectuals, from Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Larry Rivers to John Cage and Frank O’Hara.   She would marry the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. She was both a working artist and an incisive art critic, and was a candid and gimlet-eyed observer of the close-knit community that was redefining American art.  

I give the Loft Generation five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!