Irving sandler artist file

James Kalm-the guy on the bike. Follow Following. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. The Irving Sandler Artists File is a digitized image database and artist registry that is open to the public. The Artists File is not curated, and there is no fee to join or use this service.

View More on www. Our Sponsors. Irving was simply the most exemplary citizen of our world. It fueled his creativity as he wrote and rewrote and challenged history and himself always. He was the bard of the art world. His first novel, Goodbye to Tenth Street comes out this fall.

A folded paper construction of a boat sits on my desk where I work and eat. A paper construction of a boat sits on my desk. Irving Sandler! I revered Irving for his definitive work on the history of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School of the fifties—subjects, by the way, that were still too novel for the staid curriculum at The Institute of Fine Arts when I began graduate school.

As I grew into my career as an art writer and curator, Irving was crucial for inspiring and affirming my instinct for engaging in the art of my time, and was a role model for his commitment to and love for art and artists. During my terms as president of AICA-USA, Irving consistently advocated for programs to address the crisis in art criticism which he felt was excessively driven by market issues rather than by art.

When Phong Bui, Amei Wallach, and I visited Irving to present him with the award, he perked up and became engaged in conversation about young art critics. It was a privilege to have known Irving as a colleague and friend with shared ideas and values. His passion for art and the boat is his legacy to the world and to me. Irving Sandler made art history.

As a chronicler of the New York School and beyond, he held a privileged position as an active participant in the scene he documented. Affable, approachable, and wise, Irving's insightful writing balanced his personal affection for his subjects with the objectivity of an art historian. Right to the end, he was attending openings, following the careers of new artists, and writing reviews.

His landmark book, The Triumph of American Painting , produced an indelible origin study of the struggles and success of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists that remains a valuable resource. Irving was an exceptional mentor to all who knew him.

It goes without saying that I owe my career to him. As a former New York University art history student of Irving's wife, the eminent medievalist Lucy Sandler, and a recent graduate in the same subject from Columbia University, Irving tapped me for the position of curator of The Mark Rothko Foundation in Although Lucy would always feign displeasure at Irving having "corrupted" me by turning my focus to contemporary art, working for the Rothko Foundation, where Irving was a Board trustee, was a life-changing experience.

Fortunately, a few months ago, my husband Jim Clearwater and I had the chance to thank Irving in person for opening the world of contemporary art to us.

His history ultimately became our history. There was so much to be said about Irving, an extraordinary figure central to the history of the art world from the mids on; but where and how to begin? I couldn't put Swept Up down, and re-read it all the way through. It's a memoir, but it's also an engrossing critical history—the last of his art-world histories, each a close-up study of a period or phase of radical changes in art. His justifiably famous Triumph of American Painting published in cuts off in , leaving much to be said, and subsequently he said it in multiple volumes.

Adding to these his many monographs and catalogues, along with pieces for magazines and newspapers and contributions to books with multiple authors, one is tempted to ask, was he ever not writing? Irving mixes a wealth of factual information with judicious critical scrutiny and straightforward readability.

I don't know who else could have done what he did. After their enthusiasm for Abstract Expressionism ran out, none of his leading critical contemporaries really stayed the course, but that's another story. But memories are fallible and highly selective. Irving, on the other hand, kept notes. Right from the beginning.

His verbatim exchanges with artists, his highly specific accounts of key events as decade followed decade, his thoughts about what he was witnessing, his close attention as he weighed changing approaches to art—all are crucial. He recreated both the intellectual and psychological climate surrounding events and situations. An influential female art dealer, Celia Loeb, shares the sexual appetite attributed to Peggy Guggenheim, while the artists she exhibits remind us of those supported by the less flamboyant Betty Parsons.

An unpleasant critic, whom Sandler calls Marshall Hill, seems intended as a caricature of Clement Greenberg. Is the character in the novel a kind of revenge? And so on. Leaving the studio, he heads for the Cedar Tavern, where Jackson Pollock is sitting with the invented Greenberg surrogate, Marshall Hill. Goodbye to Tenth Street traces the accumulation of events and emotions, including adulation, betrayal, changing reputations, a shifting art world, and personal doubts that gradually leave Burgh deeply dissatisfied with his work, drinking heavily, and finally unable to paint—a combination of insurmountable horrors that leads him to take his own life.

We meet the generous, the terminally selfish, the ambitious, the canny, and the self-destructive, sometimes in combination as a single, contradictory person.