New York’s Midcentury Art Scene Springs to Life in ‘The Loft Generation’
Many prophesied the demise of New York City during the Great and Temporary Exodus of 2020. But none had quite the dramatic vision of Jack Tworkov, the abstract expressionist painter, in the middle of the previous century. “Imagine a great catastrophe. And all this mowed down,” he mused then, looking at photographs of buildings, envisioning rust and dust. “And tourists wandering around in all that emptiness — where was the Flatiron, the Empire State — looking for past grandeur. Imagine good old New York someday just like Egypt.”
Tworkov is one of scores who come bearing aperçus in the German American writer and artist Edith Schloss’s memoir, “The Loft Generation,” discovered in rough-draft form after her death in 2011. It’s been polished into a glowing jewel of a book by several editors including Mary Venturini, who worked with her in later years at a magazine for expats in Rome, and Schloss’s son, Jacob Burckhardt.
