Ninth Street Women

Mary Gabriel argues that the story of Abstract Expressionism as told for decades — a tale of heroic, tormented male geniuses like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning working alone in Manhattan studios — leaves out the women who were just as instrumental in developing the movement's ideas, techniques, and institutions, yet were systematically sidelined by galleries, critics, and even their own artistic partners. Through the intertwined lives of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Gabriel shows these were not muses or footnotes but working painters developing serious, original bodies of work while navigating a New York art world that treated female ambition with suspicion or outright hostility.

The book matters because it doesn't merely add women to an existing story — it demonstrates how deeply the exclusion of women shaped the way Abstract Expressionism itself came to be defined, since the movement's supposed hallmark of tortured masculine individualism was, in Gabriel's telling, partly a curatorial and critical framing that required minimizing the women working in the same rooms, exhibiting in the same shows, and sometimes developing techniques their male peers later became famous for.

Who should read it

This book is essential for anyone interested in twentieth-century American art, feminist art history, or the social history of postwar Greenwich Village bohemia, and it rewards readers willing to follow five intertwined biographies across nearly a thousand pages. It's less a quick primer on abstract painting than an immersive group biography, so readers wanting a brief overview of the movement may want a shorter survey first.

About the author

Mary Gabriel is an American author and former journalist known for extensively researched group biographies and histories, including this Pulitzer Prize finalist and her earlier biography of Karl Marx and Jenny Marx.