KBAQ Book of the Month for July

A sweeper-up after artists
By Irving Sandler

Immortalized in a line of a poem by Frank O’Hara as “A sweeper-up after Artists”, New York Art Critic Irving Sandler was anything but a bystander to the rich and varied art scene over the course of five decades in New York city. He watched the rise and fall of Abstract impressionism, Action painting, Color field painting, Pop art and more, participating as an art lover, a critic, and a friend and supporter of many of the then-struggling artists who are practically household names in the art world today.

As such, he provides a unique and valuable first-person glimpse into the New York Art scene in the heady days of the 50s, 60s and 70s, offering up-close portraits of artists like DeKooning, Pollack, Rauschenberg, Warhol and Lichtenstein, through the eyes of a friend and colleague as well as critic.

Irving Sandler, in addition to this memoir, and thousands of critical essays, has also written a four-volume history of postwar American art. He was manager of “The Club” of abstract expressionists and a co-founder of Artist’s Space. He’s currently a board member of the International art critics association and Chairman of the artists advisory committee of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. “A Sweeper-up After Artists” is published by Thames Hudson.

Irving Sandler is a wonderful tourguide through the art world of the time. Not only does he give fascinating anecdotes and insights into the art and the artists themselves, but also chronicles his own struggles with being a part of the art world and yet having to criticize it at the same time. Sandler himself comes off as a credit to his profession; thoughtful, fair, and self-effacing, he has always been more about the art itself than the egos surrounding it—his own or others—and that makes you trust what he has to say.

If I had one gripe with the book it would be this—I would have loved more pictures—of the art, the artists, the landmarks. Pictures of the art, in particular, would have been valuable to people who aren’t that familiar with some of the work. Although Sandler does include 17 pages of compelling photos of the seminal artists of the period in their studios, at art openings, and in street scenes, it made me hungry for more!

Perhaps Sandler, or someone, might consider coming out with a picture book with even more of these incredible photos in the future. I would love that, and I’m sure many other art lovers would as well.

At times, Sandler seems to forget his wider audience and lapses into a kind of art-critic-ese vocabulary that can be difficult to follow for the uninitiated. These lapses are few, though, when taken in context of the book as a whole, which is accessible to just about everyone.

These complaints aside, what Sandler has done here is nothing short of a personal history of a time that saw drastic changes in art—how artists made it, and how people looked at it—and these changes are aptly explained and expounded upon by man who was not only a spectator, “A Sweeper-up after Artists”, as poet Frank O’Hara called him, but also lived it himself.

And that makes the book “A Sweeper-up after Artists” by Irving Sandler, the Book of the month for July, 2005.