New York Was Very Heaven

By Andy Grundberg

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011 by Edith Schloss; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $32

The Loft Generation has several things to recommend it: an inspired title (that’s “Loft,” not “Lost”); a cast of characters essential to postwar American art (not only the de Koonings and Cy Twombly but also Fairfield Porter, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Harold Rosenberg, among others); a female author who knew them well and whose presence on the scene has been largely forgotten, along with her contributions to it; and finally, a gripping story about a group of young artists, many of them immigrants like Schloss, who reshaped contemporary art and in the process made New York the center of the art world.