“A portrait of the artist as a woman working and living in the heart of the downtown New York art world. Pat Lipsky’s book is a stylish, entertaining, and, above all, honest memoir of a painter’s life and times. If you wondered what it would really have been like to be an artist in the years when art was all about art, this book opens the door.”—Louis Menand, contributor to The New Yorker and Pulitzer–Prize winning author, The Metaphysical Club

“How did Pat Lipsky pull off the near-impossible feat of breaking into the hyper-macho downtown art world? She tells us in Brightening Glance. With this memoir, Lipsky proves that she’s as brilliant, energetic, and brave a writer as she is a painter.”—Lili Anolik, contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Air Mail, author, Didion & Babitz

“From fisticuffs at Max’s Kansas City between Andy Warhol’s flamboyant entourage and Carl Andre’s minimalist cadre to the secret confessions of über-critic Clement Greenberg, Brightening Glance is a shockingly candid art world exposé by a talented painter who has survived more than five decades of culture wars. As both protagonist and witness, Lipsky lays bare the vanities of the artists, dealers, and critics who made the late twentieth century art scene in New York the fulcrum of artistic innovation and ideological rivalry amidst chaotic private lives. Lipsky spares no one from her acid pen, least of all herself.”—Michael Findlay, author, Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man: New York in the Sixties

“Brightening Glance is an intense, deeply moving memoir about the New York art world, what it was, what it’s become, and what it means to have a sensibility and talent that doesn’t always fit the age. It will touch anyone who loves painting and who can find salvation in the museums and the galleries. Filled with characters, incident, and the excitement of the city at night, Lipsky’s book is balanced at that place where life becomes art.”—Rich Cohen, New York Times bestselling author and contributing editor to Rolling Stone

“Here is an artist memoir of SoHo grit and thrown punches, of bad divorces and career reversals. What sets Brightening Glance apart is the sensitivity of its observations. A praised abstractionist on canvas, Pat Lipsky on paper proves to be a sensitive portraitist, with an astonishing command of the figures who surrounded her. Tony Smith, Lee Krasner, Clement Greenberg, Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Pierre Rosenberg, among many others, leap off the page in this bittersweet and at times challenging depiction of art, love, and life.”—James Panero, executive editor at The New Criterion