New York Mid-Century: 1945–965

In the two decades after World War II, the arts flourished in New York City as never before. Painting, architecture, theater, and commercial design all found new audiences, experimented with fresh techniques, and expressed original ideas. This is an attractive book (the endpapers' design is based on a painting by Jackson Pollock), with crisp, glossy black-and-white and color photos. Scholar Cohen-Solal (Mark Rothko) traces the major trends in the visual arts, from the abstract expressionists' struggle for recognition in the 1940s through to the performance art of the 1960s. The architecture essay, by New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger (Why Architecture Matters) describes how the skyline acquired a style of modernist architecture appropriate to the city's status as world capital. The third section, by theater historian Robert Gottlieb (Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens), conveys the excitement and innovation on Broadway as well as in the experimental theater world.