Irving Sandler was an American art critic, art historian, and educator.
12 Facts About Irving Sandler
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Irving Sandler provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, beginning with abstract expressionism in the 1950s.
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Irving Sandler managed the Tanager Gallery downtown and co-ordinated the New York Artists Club of the New York School from 1955 to its demise in 1962 as well as documenting numerous conversations at the Cedar Street Tavern and other art venues.
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Irving Sandler saw himself as an impartial observer of this period, as opposed to polemical advocates such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
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Irving Sandler's family relocated to Philadelphia, then to Winnipeg, and finally back to Philadelphia.
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Irving Sandler served as a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps for three years in the Second World War.
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Irving Sandler received a bachelor's degree from Temple University in 1948, and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950.
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Irving Sandler did some additional graduate work at Columbia University, but ultimately finished a doctoral degree at New York University much later, in 1976.
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Irving Sandler started writing art criticism at the behest of Thomas B Hess for ARTnews in 1956, and was a senior critic there through 1962.
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Irving Sandler 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 founding professor in the School of Art+Design in 1972, and where he remained until his retirement.
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Irving Sandler 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.
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Irving Sandler interviewed many American artists throughout his long career, including first generation abstract expressionists such as Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Phillip Guston, and Franz Kline in 1957 and later pop protagonists such as Tom Wesselmann in 1984.