A Sweeper-up After Artists A Memoir

Irving Sandler 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 time. 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, 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. The book features striking encounters with Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and David Smith. Sandler was also a witness to, and sometimes 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 artists. In this memoir, critical judgments and personal experience are intertwined.