A sweeper-up after artists : a memoir by Irving Sandler / Irving Sandler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sandler, Irving, 1925-2018.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sandler, Irving, 1925-2018.

Sandler, Irving.

Art critics--United States--Biography.

Art critics.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

382 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Summary:

For over fifty years Irving Sandler has been a vital presence in the New York art world. Frank O'Hara called him, in a memorable poem, "the balayeur des artistes," the sweeper-up after artists. 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. His personal chronicle is the living memory of the New York art world, from abstract expressionism to the present day.

In the early 1950s, Sandler, then a graduate student in American history, was awestruck by his first sight of Franz Kline's painting Chief at MoMA. Following an urgent compulsion to understand the power of this new art he was soon the director of the Tanager Gallery, the legendary Tenth Street artists' cooperative. Graduate school gave way to being "New York schooled ... receiving my art education at artists' lofts, the Tanager and other Tenth Street cooperatives, the Cedar Street Tavern and The Club."

At all of these "schools" Sandler experienced at first hand 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. Sandler was also a witness to, and sometime participant in, the heated critical warfare between Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. We see abstract expressionism give way to the new approach of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and see that in turn succeeded by the pop and minimalist artists of the 1960s -- Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Donald Judd. At every turn, there was Irving Sandler, intimately conversant with the art and the artists. In Sandler's 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 has kept Sandler at the center of the art world for half a century.

Contents:

Preface: Reminiscences and Speculations 7

1 Stumbling Upon a Vocation 9

2 The Art World of the 1950s 21

3 My Pantheon / Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith 45

4 More First Generation Artists Who Inspired Me / Hans Hofmann, Josef Albers, Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Tony Smith 85

5 Art Criticism: Apprentice Years 111

6 My Pals in the 1950s / Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, Mark di Suvero 131

7 Art Criticism: Critics at War 179

8 The New Academy / Joan Mitchell, Raymond Parker, Grace Hartigan 217

9 Post-Gesture Painting: Out of the 1950s / Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp 247

10 Into the 1960s / Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein 281

11 The Trauma of Vietnam and its Aftermath 305

12 The Sweeper-Up After Artists 321.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0500238138

OCLC:

53392642