The cover of Prudence Peiffer’s new book, The Slip, features the kind of photograph New York City dreams are made of. In the 1958 shot, taken by Hans Namuth, a bohemian-looking group – many of whom would later become giants of American art – smoke and sip coffee on a Manhattan roof, a greyscale higgle-piggle of apartment blocks and art nouveau buildings as their backdrop. They include Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Jack Youngerman, along with Delphine Seyrig, the Lebanese-French actor, and Seyrig and Youngerman’s blond toddler son, Duncan.
The photograph was taken on the roof of 3–5 Coenties Slip, a warehouse in a small street in Manhattan’s Financial District. Artists lived in the Slip for just over a decade, from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, very cheaply and in most cases illegally, in warehouses that had once served the maritime industry. During that time, Peiffer argues, the work they produced changed American art for ever.
