This book celebrates the art, friendship, and unparalleled creativity of this revered and subversive milieu, illuminating unities and tensions, playfulness and glamour, and a startling authenticity of collaboration. From 1936 to 1975, New York artists and writers socialized, lived with, and collaborated with each other on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an effusive body of work that produced one of the most significant movements in American arts and letters and until now has only been seen in fragments. Revered as the last avant-garde, this group (often associated with post-Abstract Expressionism and the early development of Pop Art) includes artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Alex Katz, Jasper Johns, and Larry Rivers, and writers Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Ted Berrigan, to name a few. This important volume comprehensively collects for the first time their collaborations, paintings, drawings, poetry, letters, art reviews, photographs, dialogues, manifestos, and memories. It features never-before-published material, rare ephemera, and first-hand accounts from the eyewitnesses to this moment when New York reasserted itself as the centre of the art world.

Foreword by: Carter Ratcliff