The Loft Generation

A bristling and brilliant memoir of the mid-twentieth-century New York School of painters and their times by the renowned artist and critic Edith Schloss, who, from the early years, was a member of the group that shifted the centre of the art world from Paris to New York.

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

Schloss was born in Germany and moved to New York City during World War II. 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 married 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. In later life she lived in Italy and spent time with artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly, Meret Oppenheim, and Francesca Woodman.

In The Loft Generation, Schloss creates a rare and irreplaceable up-close record of an era of artistic innovation and the colourful characters who made it happen. There is no other book like it. Her firsthand information is indispensable reading for all critics and researchers of that vital period in American art.