Mary Gabriel knows that the subjects of her new book would have probably bristled at its title and, consequently, the very foundation of her approach. While working on “Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art,” Gabriel sensed the “irony of writing about these characters as ‘women artists,’” when they themselves refused “to be characterized as such.” As Elaine de Kooning put it in 1971, in a pointed rebuke to the budding field of feminist art history, “To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.”

Too bad for de Kooning, but luckily for us, Gabriel has declined to take such extreme pronouncements as the last word. “Ninth Street Women” is supremely gratifying, generous and lush but also tough and precise — in other words, as complicated and capacious as the lives it depicts. The story of New York’s postwar art world has been told many times over, but by wresting the perspective from the boozy, macho brawlers who tended to fixate on themselves and one another, Gabriel has found a way to newly illuminate the milieu and upend its clichés.

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

The title comes from the Ninth Street Show of 1951, which brought together a raucous and rivalrous art scene for one short month. “Nothing sold,” Gabriel writes, “but no one cared.” The event established New York as a confident and worthy successor to a war-wrecked Paris, showcasing 72 artists whose styles may have differed but whose mutual influence was palpable. Names that were then known mainly to other artists and curators — Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg — would soon become the mainstays of museum collections and art history textbooks.