Book excerpt: New York has always attracted artists--because it is electric with passion, endeavor, and hustle, and because they know they will find others of like mind there. The city is a vibrant center of the international art world; no wonder then that both resident and sojourning painters have long felt compelled to capture, interpret, and evoke the place on canvas. Bruce Weber faced a daunting amount of works for inclusion in Paintings of New York. But he chose well, producing a book that combines solid scholarship in history and the arts, warmly readable prose, and gorgeous color images. Artwork included by Piet Mondrian, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, William Glackens, Georgia O'Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Raphael Soyer, Charles Frederic Ulrich, Albertus Del Orient Browere, Thomas Moran, Joseph Stella, Elsie Driggs, George Bellows, Otto Boetticher, Robert Henri, George Tooker, Francis Guy, Thomas Hart Benton, and Ben Shahn.