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New York School (art)

The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. They often drew inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world's vanguard circle.

For educational institutions in the state of New York, see education in New York (state).

Except for Schuyler, all overlapped at ,

Harvard University

Except for Ashbery, all did military service,

Except for Koch, all reviewed art,

Except for Ashbery, all lived in New York during their formative years as poets.

Frank O'Hara was at the center of the group before his death in 1966. Because of his numerous friendships and his post as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he provided connections between the poets and painters such as Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers (who was O'Hara's lover). There were many joint works and collaborations, particularly between poets such as O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler: Rivers inspired a play by Koch, Koch and Ashbery together wrote the poem "A Postcard to Popeye", Ashbery and Schuyler wrote the novel A Nest of Ninnies, and Schuyler collaborated on an ode with O'Hara, whose portrait was painted by Rivers.[1]


Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Joe Brainard, and Ted Berrigan came to the group from Tulsa, Oklahoma.


Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery were quite different as poets, but they admired each other and had much in common personally:[1]


All four were inspired by French Surrealists such as Raymond Roussel, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire. David Lehman, in his book on the New York poets, wrote: "They favored wit, humor and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent prank or jest) in ways more suggestive of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg than of the New York School abstract expressionist painters after whom they were named."[1]

Poetry[edit]

Concerning the New York School poets, critics argued that their work was a reaction to the Confessionalist movement in Contemporary Poetry. Their poetic subject matter was often light, violent, or observational, while their writing style was often described as cosmopolitan and world-traveled.


The poets often wrote in an immediate and spontaneous manner reminiscent of stream of consciousness writing, often using vivid imagery. They drew on inspiration from Surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York City art world circle such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.


Poets often associated with the New York School include John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, David Shapiro, Lorenzo Thomas, Ted Greenwald, Eileen Myles, Kenward Elmslie, John Giorno, Barbara Barg, Jerome Sala, Elaine Equi, Frank Lima, Ron Padgett, Lewis Warsh, Tom Savage and Joseph Ceravolo.

Music[edit]

The term also refers to a circle of composers in the 1950s which included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff.[29] Their music influenced the music and events of the Fluxus group, and drew its name from the Abstract Expressionist painters above.

Dance[edit]

During the 1960s the Judson Dance Theater located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York City, revolutionized Modern dance. Combining in new ways the idea of Performance art, radical and new Choreography, sound from avant-garde composers, and dancers in collaboration with several New York School Visual artists.


The group of artists that formed Judson Dance Theater are considered the founders of Postmodern dance. The theater grew out of a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied with John Cage. The artists involved with Judson Dance Theater were avant-garde experimenatalists who rejected the confines of ballet technique, vocabulary and theory.


The first Judson concert took place on July 6, 1962, with dance works presented by Steve Paxton, Freddie Herko, David Gordon, Alex and Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Summers, William Davis, and Ruth Emerson. Seminal dance artists that were a part of the Judson Dance Theater include: David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Aileen Passloff, and Meredith Monk. The years 1962 to 1964 are considered the golden age of the Judson Dance Theater.


During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s New York School artists collaborated with several other choreographer / dancers including: Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and Paul Taylor.

Philip Pavia; Natalie Edgar, , New York: Midmarch Arts, 2007.

Club without walls: selection from the Journals of Philip Pavia

Irving Sandler, , New York; London: Harper and Row, 1978. ISBN 0-06-438505-1, ISBN 978-0-06-438505-3

‘’The New York School: the painters & sculptors of the fifties,’’

Irving Sandler, , New York; London: Harper and Row, 1977. ISBN 0-06-430075-7, ISBN 978-0-06-430075-9

‘’ The triumph of American painting: a history of abstract expressionism’’

Marika Herskovic, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4

American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey,

Marika Herskovic, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6

New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists,

Statutes of Liberty, The New York School of Poets, Geoff Ward, Second Edition, 2001.

, Donald Merriam Allen, 1969.

The New American Poetry, 1945–1960

An Anthology of New York Poets, (ed.) and David Shapiro (ed.), 1970.

Ron Padgett

Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, University of Texas Press, 1977.

Marjorie Perloff

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, , 1998.

David Lehman

Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The New York School, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965.

Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, Penguin Books, 1979.

Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art : Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago : , 1983.

University of Chicago Press