June 7th: Charles Darwent in conversation with Nancy Princenthal

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Charles Darwent will discuss his new book Surrealists in New York with Nancy Princenthal.

This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd street, on Wednesday, June 7th at 7 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.

Charles Darwent — Surrealists in New York (Published by Thames & Hudson, 2023)

In 1957 the American artist Robert Motherwell made an unexpected claim: "I have only known two painting milieus well … the Parisian Surrealists, with whom I began painting seriously in New York in 1940, and the native movement that has come to be known as 'abstract expressionism,' but which genetically would have been more properly called 'abstract surrealism.'"

Motherwell’s bold assertion, that abstract expressionism was neither new nor local, but born of a brief liaison between America and France, verged on the controversial. Surrealists in New York tells the story of this "liaison" and the European exiles who bought Surrealism with them—an artistic exchange between the Old World and the New—centering on taciturn printmaker Stanley William Hayter and the legendary Atelier 17 print studio he founded. Here artists’ experiments literally pushed the boundaries of modern art. It was in Hayter’s studio that Jackson Pollock found the balance of freedom and control that would culminate in his distinctive drip paintings.

The impact of Max Ernst, André Masson, Louise Bourgeois and other noted émigrés on the work of Motherwell, Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the American avant-garde has for too long been quietly written out of art history. Drawing on first-hand documents, interviews, and archive materials, Charles Darwent brings to life the events and personalities from this crucial encounter, revealing a fascinating new perspective on the history of the art of the twentieth century. 

Charles Darwent is an art critic and reviewer. He contributes regularly to the Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Apollo, and the Times Literary Supplement, and was the Independent on Sunday’s chief art critic from 1999 to 2013. He is the author of Mondrian in London: How English Art Nearly Became Modern and Josef Albers: Life and Work, and appeared in the Netflix series Raiders of the Lost Art from 2014 to 2016.

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (Thames & Hudson, 2019) and Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), and her essays have appeared in monographs on Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold, Willie Cole and Gary Simmons, among many others. A Contributing Editor (and former Senior Editor) of Art in America, she has also written for Bomb, the New York Times, Apollo, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. Princenthal has lectured widely, and taught at Bard College, Princeton University, Yale University, and the School of Visual Arts.