The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art

This vibrant, intimate, gripping group portrait of American Abstract Expressionists shows how the anguish of their personal lives fed into their art. Kingsley, a Manhattan-based art critic and curator, focuses on 1950, the pivotal ``year of greatest interaction'' among Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and their associates, and the only year when they all lived and worked together in New York City. Their circle included the near-destitute Franz Kline, whose wife spent 14 years in a mental hospital; Robert Motherwell, who oscillated between ``atavistic caveman'' and Francophile sophisticate; sculptor David Smith, prone to domestic violence and abuse of women; and the mordantly romantic Arshile Gorky, whose wife left him shortly after an auto accident in which he suffered a broken neck and a paralyzed painting arm. Despite the outward differences between Pollock's famous drips and Barnett Newman's vertical ``zip,'' these artists shared a desire to let content emerge directly from the psyche and a ``desperation to speak through the medium of paint alone.'' Illustrated. (Aug.)