Irving Sandler

Irving Sandler
Born	Irving Sandler (1925-07-22) July 22, 1925 New York City
Occupation	Writer, educator, curator
Education	M.A. U. of Pennsylvania, 1950 Ph.D. New York University, 1976
Alma mater	Temple University, 1948

Irving Sandler (born July 22, 1925 in New York City) is an American art critic, art historian, and educator. He has provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, beginning with abstract expressionismin the 1950s, where he managed the Tanager Gallery downtown and co-ordinated the New York artists' ZT 'Club' of the New York School from 1955 to its demise in 1962 as well as documenting numerous conversations from the Cedar Street Tavern and other artists venues. Sandler saw himself as an impartial observer of this period, as opposed to polemical advocates such as Clement Greenberg or Harold Rosenberg.

Biography

Sandler was raised in Philadelphia. He served with the U.S. Marine Corps for three years in the Second World War. He received a bachelor's degree from Temple University in 1948, and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950. He did some additional graduate work at Columbia University, but ultimately finished a doctoral degree at New York University much later, in 1976. He started writing art criticism at the behest of Thomas B. Hess for ARTNews in 1956, and was a senior critic there through 1962. He has taught at several universities, including the Pratt Institute, New York University, and the State University of New York at Purchase, where he was appointed a professor in 1972.

Sandler has curated several critically acclaimed exhibitions including the "Concrete Expressionism Show" in 1965 at New York University, which featured the work of painters Al Held and Knox Martin and the sculptors Ronald Bladen, George Sugarman and David Weinrib, and "The Prospect Mountain Sculpture Show" in 1977. Many American artists have been interviewed by Sandler, including first generation abstract expressionists such as Robert Motherwell, Willem DeKooning, Phillip Guston, and Franz Kline. in 1957 and later pop protagonists such as Tom Wesselmann in 1984. In the 1970s he was co-founder of Artists Space, that helped launch the careers of Judy Pfaff, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman amongst others.

As indicated in the bibliography below, Sandler has written several monographs on individual artists as well as a sweeping, four-volume survey of "postmodern art" (The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), and Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996).). Robert Storr has described the history, "Narrative, untheoretical--at times antitheoretical--and unapologetically focused not just on what happened in the United States but principally on what happened in Manhattan, Sandler's surveys have been widely criticized but even more widely used, not least because they are readable and deeply informed by their author's unrivaled access to the artists and art-worldings about whom he writes." Sandler continues to write, and is concerned with allowing certain aspects of New York painting to be reassessed, as in his recent work on Esteban Vicente (2007). In 2009 he published Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: a Reevaluation.

Selected Works

• Introduction by Russell Panczenko.
• A collection of Sandler's writings spanning six decades.
• Forward by Raphael Rubinstein.

External links

• Irving Sandler papers, ca. 1950-2000. Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.
• [1] Irving Sandler in conversation with Roberta Smith for the Brooklyn Rail, April 2009.
• [2] Irving Sandler interview with Phong Bui in front of a live audience for Art International Radio, November 2013.
• [3] Irving Sandler in conversation with Jerry Saltz for the Brooklyn Rail, September 2008.