I was thrilled to see a review at Book­fo­rum yes­ter­day for Artists’ Ses­sions at Studio 35 (1950). The book is an ele­gantly bound tran­script of a closed-​door, three-​day sem­i­nar on modern art attended by, inter alia, Robert Moth­er­well, Louise Bour­geois, Hans Hof­mann, Willem de Koon­ing, Richard Pousette-​Dart, and Ad Rein­hardt. This sec­tion of Ana Finel Honigman’s review seems espe­cially rel­e­vant to con­ver­sa­tions that have been taking place here at DE recently:

Moth­er­well may have posed the ses­sions’ most vital ques­tion when he asked, “What then exactly con­sti­tutes the basis of our com­mu­nity?” This ques­tion is per­haps more intrigu­ing than the con­cep­tual and formal con­cerns raised because of how tightly his­tory inter­twines the artists involved in the New York School. The ses­sions at Studio 35 were held a year before the ground­break­ing 9th Street Art Exhi­bi­tion, the public’s intro­duc­tion to the work of the New York avant-​garde, but the par­tic­i­pants were evi­dently eager to map out their cre­ative rela­tion­ships to one another and to inves­ti­gate Hare’s query, “Do we artists really have a com­mu­nity? If so, what makes it a community?”

The pub­li­ca­tion of Artists’ Ses­sions was a labor of love for my friend Julia Klein, who is an artist, not a pub­lisher, by trade. Julia wanted to get this doc­u­ment, which she found tremen­dously ener­giz­ing, out into the wide world, and so she founded Sober­scove Press to pub­lish the book in an attrac­tive edi­tion that wouldn’t cost too much. She man­aged to do just that: you can buy a copy of the book for just $10 at the Sober­scove web­site. Go do it!