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.”