With “New Art City” (Alfred A. Knopf, 608 pages, $35), Jed Perl has written the history of the New York art world’s rise to world dominance in the 1950s. His narrative spans four decades and brings the city and its many artistic worlds alive in a vast and rich panorama. The story is how “in a fifteen-year period that began roughly with de Kooning’s first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948 and ended when Pop Art was the darling of the news media, New York became, by near universal agreement, the world center for artistic experimentation.”

This book is not a celebration of the “Triumph of American Painting,” which seemed a fortuitous phrase as the title of Irving Sandler’s 1976 history of Abstract Expressionism and now sounds almost self-serving. Nor does Mr. Perl engage with Cold War politics, as Serge Guilbaut did in his America-bashing “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art” (1985).That book was a kind of defensive European response to justifiable American pride in its rise to worldwide cultural influence. (Abstract Expressionism was much less parochial than its earliest critics made it appear.) Mr. Perl is interested not in politics or socioeconomics but in art, in how the city depicted in Willem de Kooning’s early monochrome abstractions – “the night city, the dream city, the city of a time when artists were still trying to wake up to the promise of the historical imagination”- evolved so spectacularly on canvas into Fairfield Porter’s New York – “the city of daylight, the city as an ordinary reality, and thus an affirmation of the city as a product of the empirical imagination.” In other words, how New York “found its place in the history of art.”

The organizational scheme for this abundance of information is the author’s own romance with his subject. The sections have headings like “Some Versions of Romanticism” and “Climate of New York.” The chapter titles are splendidly poetic: “The Philosopher King,” “A Splendid Modesty,” or “Maine, Marfa, and Manhattan.” While admitting that the subject has been “studied by several generations of artists, museum-goers, critics, curators, and historians, many of whom are inclined to regard the 1950s as a grittily glamorous Golden Age, and who probably regret not having had the opportunity to know that world firsthand,” Mr. Perl never hints at any such regret for himself. Indeed, the generational gap powers his narrative. His distance has allowed him to analyze and brilliantly synthesize the oft-contentious writings of those who were there: from the obvious, like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, to the less well-known, like John Graham, Edwin Denby, Wylie Sypher, and Rudi Blesch. He builds a rich skein from their writings, one that is akin to the heroic Jackson Pollock drip paintings that form a part – but only a part – of the story.

In Mr. Perl’s book, as in a Pollock painting, countless engaging and colorful strands of differing textures move across the canvas in seemingly disorganized ways, creating a readable image without a definable center, luring you even beyond its edges. New York is the subject of Mr. Perl’s book, but he is never parochial about it. He pays attention to the artists’ constant interactions, not only with contemporaneous European artists and writers but also European art-historical sources (the discussion of the 17th-century French painters the Le Nains is unexpected and compelling).So, too, he weaves into his narrative the cross-fertilizations with, for example, the Bay Area Figuratives (Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still as teachers to Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park) or the impact of Chick Austin’s tenure at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum.

While there are inevitable repetitions – Hilla Rebay appears too often – the reality is that many of the main characters (e.g., Hans Hofmann, Pollock, de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp) fit neatly into more than one of the book’s thematic thrusts, and these recapitulations generally strengthen Mr. Perl’s case. This is an incredibly complicated and rich series of stories, which can be understood only through how they relate to one another. Teasing them apart while also weaving them together is Mr. Perl’s most impressive achievement.

All the usual suspects make their appearance here, and a great many unjustly forgotten figures. In particular, Mr. Perl restores Hans Hofmann to his rightful position as the fulcrum of what was happening in the 1950s. His emphasis put me in mind of Hofmann’s bequest of paintings to the University of California, Berkeley – the motivating force behind the establishment of the University Art Museum (now called Berkeley Art Museum), which opened in 1971. The founding director, Peter Selz (a player in Mr. Perl’s book from his days at the Museum of Modern Art), asked Hofmann students to contribute work in memory of their master, and many responded generously (though their work has seldom been on view along with Hofmann’s). These are painters worth remembering.

This book should encourage us to take new looks at artists we have tossed overboard in our need to make a pantheon of the biggest stars (and best investments), rather than with an interest in a range of really good art. Mr. Perl subtly reminds us that we might do well to look again at Alfred Russell or Leland Bell or Gretna Campbell or Pavel Tchelitchew or Earl Kerkam or Mercedes Matter. Women artists play a significant role in Mr. Perl’s narrative, because “for women who had the temerity, this period, when it was taken for granted that the social conventions were at best wobbly, presented the possibility of a woman’s self-invention or re-creation.” Mr. Perl is even slightly puzzled at the seductively high profiles of middle-aged teacher/critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg in an era that glamorized youth.

For those who experienced the years under the microscope, there will be much to argue about. This is not a book without judgments – even if Mr. Perl does make them with endlessly wonderful turns of phrase. He understands Duchamp’s “ambiguous kind of power” and refers to Jasper Johns as “slumming – oh so elegantly.” Ellsworth Kelly’s is “the art of the flaneur … who was immersed in his own empyreal imagination and distilled each fragment of the world into an exquisitely enigmatic form.” His critique of Louise Nevelson (“fractured kind of architectural gingerbread” or “all too styled nostalgia, without Cornell’s obdurate radicalism”) seems very much on target. And Mr. Perl’s endlessly apt phrases have real visual power. Take Pollock’s “Cathedral”: “beguilingly informal way of setting little swipes of yellow and orange within a dense, silver matrix” and “shimmering, twinkling power – a quiet resplendence” and “sinew to its lacy fascination.”

Such writing makes Mr. Perl’s narrative a delight to read. He never stoops to fashionable language to give substance to his ideas, and his avoidance of the arcane lingo that now passes for art criticism is refreshing. At 500-plus pages “New Art City” is not quite a page-turner, but I was amazed at how engaging this story becomes in the hands of a brilliant critic who is also a painter and art historian – talents that too seldom merge. Start spreading the news – Jed Perl has given us a new standard book in the art-historical field.

Mr. Freudenheim is a former assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution.