THE GREATEST WORK OF ART
by Jerry Saltz



The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city’s magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 is an image of what New York felt, looked, and sounded like in 1950. There’s the optical hop of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie; the Brooklyn Bridge paintings of Joseph Stella; Willem de Kooning’s sluicing flumes of luscious paint that conjure a writhing New York Babylon. There are endless portraits and pictures of the city’s denizens, old and young, famous and not by Alice Neel, Florine Stettheimer, Irving Penn, Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol.

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