life work; Three dazzling new books explore the fertile ground where art and experience intertwine.(The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa)(New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century)(Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic)(Brief Article)(Book Review)

Byline: Leslie Camhi

Michael Kimmelman's day job as chief art critic for The New York Times takes him regularly through the minds of artists and art people, from the painter Pierre Bonnard's tenderness toward his notoriously reclusive wife (and favorite model), Marthe, to a mad collector's passion for light bulbs. His latest book, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (Penguin), weaves together bits of memoir, travel writing, and biography, with wide-ranging and brilliant critical reflections on finding the art in everyday life. Who else could move gracefully, in a single essay, between a rare sixteenth-century German altarpiece and monuments of 1970s land art in the American Southwest?

In mid-twentieth-century Manhattan, the ferment of artistic experimentation seemed to percolate on every street corner: in midtown's rising glass-and-steel skyscrapers, in the gallery openings spilling out onto Tenth Street, and farther south, in the cold-water lofts where painting, ...