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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