‘The Slip’ Review: Dockside Visionaries

The Slips of lower Manhattan—sites of former ship berths on the East River, now landfill paved into streets and plazas—evoke, in our historical memory, the tall ships and chandleries of the 19th century, when trade and New York Harbor fueled the city’s explosive growth. The oblong spaces and slants of light in the Slips are visually enigmatic among a forest of skyscrapers, and, at certain points open onto heaving currents and panoramic views of Brooklyn. The South Street Seaport is an ode to that past.

In her marvelous, crisply written “The Slip,” Prudence Peiffer showcases a cadre of artists who resided along Coenties Slip—now a part of the Financial District near Pearl Street—in the late 1950s and ’60s, decades after the schooners and frigates moved to the Hudson River. By necessity these artists lived cheaply, squatting in lofts amid abandoned warehouses and toiling over canvases and sculptures. They imagined fresh possibilities in the wake of the Abstract Expressionists’ breakthroughs.

Ms. Peiffer, an editor at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, launches her narrative with a 1958 photograph snapped by Hans Namuth, a group portrait on the tar-papered roof of 3-5 Coenties. Their postures speak to an ease among the subjects, born of the romance of being young and ambitious in New York. “The Slip” revolves around the close friendship between the gay Ellsworth Kelly and the straight Jack Youngerman, ex-GIs who’d met in Paris after World War II, but Ms. Peiffer places their bond in a wider circle: Youngerman’s French-Lebanese wife, actress Delphine Seyrig, destined for celluloid immortality in Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad”; the gifted Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark), briefly Kelly’s lover; Lenore Tawney, who experimented with textiles; Agnes Martin, a nomadic minimalist who hid her schizophrenia; and Minnesota-raised James Rosenquist, whose graphics heralded Pop art. There are titillating cameos, too, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose apartment was around the corner. (They kept an aloof if polite distance.)

For its residents, Coenties was “down downtown,” outside of Manhattan; to venture across Front Street was to go “into the city.” Much of their work reacted against Abstract Expressionism, dominant in postwar American art and itself a rejection of the easel tradition. Jackson Pollock’s fatal car crash on Long Island in 1956 affirmed “Ab Ex” as the reigning aesthetic by serving up a tragic myth of a genius destroyed by his own demons. The Coenties community preferred a quieter life to the “raucous, bellicose” scene at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, a favorite haunt of the Ab Ex crowd. By contrast, Youngerman said, he and his friends were “a bunch of Protestants from the hinterlands.” They staked out a couple of austere blocks ornamented only by a tangle of ginkgo trees and a lighthouse perched atop the Seaman’s Church Institute, commemorating the sinking of the Titanic.

Here they explored a gamut of ideas and methods, but they were “a group brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique or even philosophy—as with Abstract Expressionism—or by a particular way of reacting or synthesizing the cultural moment, as with Pop art,” Ms. Peiffer observes. Reflecting on Namuth’s rooftop photo, she asks, “What if we thought about groups in art history based instead on shared places? What if, rather than technique or style, it’s a spirit of place that defines a crucial moment?”

Ms. Peiffer shifts between profiles of each figure and the neighborhood’s rich past, tracking back to the colonial period: “The Slip was a modest, almost forgotten place, an alley dead-ending in shipworm- and gribbles-infested piers.” In its shapeshifting she spots “the entire history of the island in its cobblestones.” The site was a business hub from its early days, “built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings just down Pearl Street,” and name-checked in Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” Amid cycles of trade, the Slip weathered “the boom and bust and boom and bust of maritime and light industries.”

While her transitions to and from the past are occasionally jarring, Ms. Peiffer highlights the ironic contrast between the Coenties’ impoverished crew and Wall Street, yards away, as well as the more subtle connections between the two. Postwar painters often trained as commercial illustrators and billboard designers, from Rosenquist to de Kooning to Warhol. Unlike European painters who drew on a centuries-long heritage of luminous chiaroscuros and vanishing points, Americans exploited the materials themselves, stripped of any obligation to representation.

Agnes Martin, the middle-aged purist, swapped arid New Mexico for harbor fog. Ms. Peiffer finds in Martin’s restless movements a key to the oppositions central to her oeuvre: “Going back and forth between the city and the desert underscored a broader theme throughout her life, between separateness and community, that mimicked the great, stark contradictions of America itself . . . urban drive and pastoral stillness, capitalist appetite and Calvinist restraint.” Meanwhile, Lenore Tawney’s innovations in weaving—she invented new methods, tools and forms—elevated fabrics as mediums for storytelling.

Ms. Peiffer’s chapters on Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana are her best. A protégé of Alexander Calder, Kelly was obsessed with color—for him, “there were a thousand yellows in the world”—and his bold canvases are paeans to primary hues. His plant drawings are now staples of museums. As a teenager Indiana had studied Latin and was keen on the Greek statues called “herms,” classical pillars with male heads and carved genitals. He updated these sculptures with scraps scavenged in the neighborhood, adding words—CHIEF, AHAB, TUG—that alluded to his waterfront setting.

By the mid-1960s the Coenties artists had dispersed to other locales. While Ms. Peiffer’s book doesn’t fulfill its subtitle’s claim that the Slip “changed American art forever,” it’s nonetheless a vivid account of a significant moment in its history. There are still pockets of Georgian buildings along lower Manhattan’s fringe, but they’re overshadowed by glass towers, markers of the encroaching finance sector. “To live at the Slip was to live within a palimpsest of history,” Ms. Peiffer writes, “where the present was never quite fixed.” And where the chance to take a new departure perpetually beckoned.

—Mr. Cain is the author of “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”