Albert York

Art critic Calvin Tomkins has called Albert York (1928–2009) “the most highly admired unknown artist in America.” Over the course of three decades, York’s small paintings of landscapes, flowers, cows and figures have proven among the most quietly transcendent pictures of our time. Because he worked on the east end of Long Island, far from the center of the Manhattan art world, York’s art remained something of a secret, albeit one with a devoted following. His admirers included Fairfield Porter, Susan Rothenberg, Paul Mellon, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Edward Gorey, who once said he would “buy anything of York’s, sight unseen, if anything were available.”

Originally published in 2015 and quickly going out of print, this book provides the first substantial overview of this reclusive artist. Including full-color plates of over 60 works spanning York’s career, a new essay by poet and art critic Bruce Hainley, plus earlier essays by Fairfield Porter and Calvin Tomkins, a chronology, a complete bibliography and a detailed catalog of works, this publication is a testament to, as Hainley puts it, York’s “pursuit of lyric intensity while negotiating a point-blank confrontation with history—all in stealth relation to the leopard-alive instant at the end of the brush.”