"A spectacular historical show of art and documentation, 'New York: 1962-1964,' at the Jewish Museum, addresses the exact years of my tatterdemalion arrival, from the Midwest..."

"... as an ambitious poet, a jobber in journalism, and a tyro art nut. I gravitated through the time’s impecunious Lower East Side poetry scene into the booming though not yet oligarchic art world....  The eruptive early sixties launched many folks on all sorts of trajectories. After intriguing for a trice, some quickly flamed out or stalled, suggesting to me a theory, which I kept to myself, of Temporary Meaning in Art: get it while it’s hot or miss it forever, at a cost to your sophistication. Others, at the margins of fame, hung fire for unjustly belated recognition.... [F]ew women at the time were given their due, which should accrue to them in retrospect. New to me is a garish relief painting, from 1963, by the underknown Marjorie Strider, of a glamour girl chomping on a huge red radish, that could serve as an icon of Pop glee and sexual impertinence crossed with proto-feminist vexation."

Writes Peter Schjeldahl, in "When New York Ruled the World/A spectacular show of art and documentation at the Jewish Museum captures New York in 1962-64, an era of near-weekly advances in all of the arts" (The New Yorker).

I like the word "underknown." It's underused.

And "tatterdemalion." There's a vocabulary word for you. It just means a person wearing tatters. Though it sounds like something from the 19th century, it goes back to the 1600s. And  Peter Schjeldahl has used it before: 

April 2003: "[P]olitical correctness... is apparent in the fashionable euphemism for outsider artists as 'self-taught.' As if any true artist were not self-taught!... Such misguided compunctions blunt the jagged, tatterdemalion otherness that is central to our experience of a Wölfli, a Darger, or a Ramirez."

September 2003: "Shallow but dazzling, Matta... was a toast of the uptown art world, where the 'imported surrealists,' in Clement Greenberg’s contemptuous phrase, formed a deluxe avant-garde remote from that of the tatterdemalion American painters."

April 2015: "[T]he Italian architect Renzo Piano’s ingenious building... stands at the southern end of the High Line and hard by the Hudson River, in what remains of the tatterdemalion meatpacking district."