A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir by Irving Sandler Book

Frank O'Hara called him, in a memorable poem, the "balayeur des artistes," the sweeper-up of artists. For over fifty years Irving Sandler has been a vital presence in the New York art world. He has been a friend or acquaintance of virtually every important American artist of the postwar period, and his art criticism and books constitute the first and most comprehensive critical and historical account of this extraordinary period. There is no one else whose personal chronicle is also the living memory of the New York art world, from abstract expressionism to the present day. Beginning in 1952, Sandler became "New York schooled...receiving my art education at artists' lofts, the Tanager and other Tenth Street cooperatives, the Cedar St. Tavern, and The Club." At all of these "schools" Sandler experienced firsthand the lives of great artists and the making of great art. His memoir captures the anguished intensity of the period, with World War II an immediate memory and the imminence of nuclear disaster an everyday presence. Here are striking encounters with Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, and David Smith. He was also a witness to, and sometime participant in, the heated critical warfare between Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. We watch the first generation of abstract expressionists give way to a second, and see that in turn succeeded by the artists of the 1960s—Stella, Rauschenberg, and Johns—to be followed by pop and minimalism. At every turn, there was Irving Sandler, intimately conversant with the art and the artists. In this vivid memoir, critical judgments and personal experience are uniquely intertwined. Readers will be captivated by the intelligence, the unassuming confidence, and the sheer personableness that have kept Sandler at the center of the art world for half a century. 20 illustrations.Read More