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WD_164/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 15.6 x 12.5 | | Size (mm): | 400 x 320 | | Catalog #: | WD_0164 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Biographical Note: Irving Sandler (1925 ~).
Irving Sandler was born in New York City in 1925. He holds a B.A. from Temple University (1948) and an M.A. from University of Pennsylvania (1950), where he studied American history. His interests turned then to contemporary art, specifically the abstract expressionist painting current in the 1950s New York art world. He tried his hand at painting for a year or so, and became manager of a gallery on 10th Street, thereby meeting artists he admired. Soon feeling his vocation to be that of chronicler and critic rather than artist, in 1954 Sandler began taking copious notes of conversations with artists, or among artists, during informal gatherings at the Club, the Cedar Street Tavern, or in artists' studios. In 1956, he became the director of the Tanager Gallery, Program Chairman for the Artists' Club, and a reviewer for Art News and Art International, establishing two roles that he would fill for the rest of his career: supporter of emergent artist groups, and advocate critic. A third role, that of professor, emerged in the 1960s.
Sandler's approach to art criticism was, like Greenberg's and Rosenberg's, grounded in personal friendships with artists whose work he reviewed, but Sandler avoided the extreme partisanship and rancor for which those critics are known. Maintaining a personal ethic of openness to new styles or schools of art, and a methodology that considered art world consensus on the one hand and the artist's intention on the other, he flourished as a relevant commentator of contemporary art for five decades. In the 1970s, Sandler began writing books that synthesized his collection of interviews and reviews into broad surveys of contemporary art, including 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). In addition, he wrote monographs on individual artists, such as Alex Katz and Mark Di Suvero.
After teaching at New York University throughout the 1960s, Sandler earned a Ph.D. in Art History in 1976; for the rest of his academic career he taught at SUNY Purchase, with occasional visiting professorships at other northeastern U.S. institutions. In 1972, he organized "Artist's Space, " an alternative exhibition space for young artists. Laurie Anderson, Judy Pfaff, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Chuck Close are among those that got their start there. He served on the board of, or otherwise lent support to, many other artists' organizations. Eventually, he held influential positions in academic and curatorial organizations as well, such as the College Art Association and Independent Curators Incorporated, and in major foundations supporting the arts, such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sharpe Art Foundation. Having a special interest in public art, he served on the board of Public Art Fund, which generated public art projects such as "Sculpture in Environment, " "City Walls" and "Prospect Mountain, " and was involved in many other public art commissions around the country.
-www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/finding_aids/sandler_m5.html
PAINTING AND SCULPTURE : II. Since the Armory Show by Hilton Kramer.
The 1913 Armory Show, which gave American artists and the public their first comprehensive look at the art produced by the modernist movement in Europe, had a profound effect on the way painting and sculpture in the United States were subsequently created. It also changed the way art was thought about. The American art world promptly divided into modernists and traditionalists, and their conflict often took the form of a fierce rivalry between an artistic minority that embraced the ideas of the European avant-garde and the majority who remained loyal to more familiar conservative styles. Although at first outnumbered, the minority that found in modernism its principal source of inspiration set the pace in artistic achievement for the remainder of the century.
The history of American painting and sculpture since 1913 is therefore, in large part, the history of American modernism and of the varying responses it met with in the course of the century. This history divides itself into two distinct periods. During the first, which began in 1913-1914 and ended in the early 1940s, the modernists worked under severe handicaps. With few exceptions, the public tended to be either hostile or indifferent to their work. Patronage was scarce and public ridicule common. Museums, the galleries, the collectors, the critics, and the academy generally regarded modernist art as aesthetic heresy, a betrayal of established standards if not indeed a threat to public morality. As a result, modernist artists were condemned to live and work in bohemian coteries and isolated enclaves outside the mainstream of American cultural life.
During the second period, which commenced with World War II and continues to the present day, the modernists acquired an ever-increasing measure of public recognition and artistic influence. By the end of the 1950s, their work had achieved a position of dominance in American cultural life. It now enjoyed widespread support from the institutions that had formerly spurned it, and these institutions were now more numerous and more powerful than before. For the first time, moreover, American modernist art occupied a prominent place in world esteem. Several modernists of the post-World War II period—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning—became international celebrities.
This change paralleled a larger change in the relation between Europe and America. Until the beginning of World War II, Paris remained the unrivaled artistic capital of the Western world, the place where seminal art movements, from impressionism and postimpressionism in the nineteenth century to fauvism, cubism, and surrealism in the twentieth, were born and developed. It was thus to Paris that the first generation of American modernists looked for artistic leadership. It was to Paris that a significant number of the outstanding talents of that generation—Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Man Ray, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, John Marin, and Alfred Maurer, among others—traveled in order to establish contact with the art and the artists who were definitively altering the way painting and sculpture would henceforth be thought about. To meet the challenge of the new pictorial ideas to be found in the work of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and others now became the irresistible imperative for this first generation of American modernists. Although their art remained in many ways American in fundamental outlook and character, Paris was nonetheless indispensable to their aesthetic orientation and to the standards by which this generation judged its achievements.
In the early 1940s, however, New York emerged for the first time as the artistic capital of the West. The Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940 marked the end of the reign that French art had enjoyed on the world scene for well over a century. In Nazi-occupied Europe, modernism—now stigmatized by Adolf Hitler as "degenerate"—was officially banned, and the United States became a refuge for many of the Europeans who had devoted their lives to it. It was to New York, in particular, that important representatives of the European avant-garde—not only artists but art dealers, art historians, museum curators, collectors, and writers on art—now expatriated themselves.
Their presence in New York during the war years had a powerful catalytic effect on American art and the whole cultural scene. European modernism still exerted an immense influence on the thinking of this emerging American vanguard, but with Europe itself in a state of political chaos and the future of its civilization in doubt, it seemed possible for American modernists to seize the artistic initiative, and they did. The result was the abstract expressionist movement—later dubbed the New York school—that catapulted American painting into a position of international dominance in the postwar era.
This development would have seemed unimaginable even a few years earlier. Between the two world wars, modernist art in America was very much on the defensive. New and important modernists came to prominence; Stuart Davis and Milton Avery were the most accomplished among the painters, and Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, and Alexander Calder, among the sculptors. Yet in the 1920s, the older generation of modernists had to some extent retreated from its avant-garde ambitions, seeking to entrench its art in a more recognizably American subject matter.
In the depression era of the thirties this nativist impulse acquired added political momentum with the emergence of two popular movements adamantly opposed to modernism and to the cosmopolitan culture it encompassed. One of these movements was called the American scene, which had its headquarters in the Midwest and specialized in idealized depictions of American rural, frontier, and small-town life. Its leading representatives were Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, and its driving spirit was populist, isolationist, and xenophobic. Its regionalist outlook proscribed modernism and the metropolitan centers that fostered it as alien intrusions into the purity of American life.
The other antimodernist movement was the school of social realism that was tethered to the cultural and political program of the Communist party and its Popular Front. Social realists championed social consciousness in art under the banner of an antifascist crusade. The leading representatives of this school were Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Jacob Lawrence, and William Gropper, and its principal focus was on class conflict, the plight of the poor and the dispossessed, and idealized depictions of the working class and rural poverty.
With the American economy in collapse in the thirties, both of these movements—the one essentially nativist, the other leftist—exerted a tremendous influence; the modernists were shunted off to the margins of American cultural life. Even the institution that was founded in 1929 to champion the cause of modernism—the Museum of Modern Art in New York—offered little support to the struggling American representatives of vanguard painting and sculpture. Although the museum was making its successful pioneering effort to introduce the American public to the classics of European modernism—Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso—its first acquisition for its permanent collection was a railway landscape by the American realist Edward Hopper. It wasn't until the 1940s that the museum took up the cause of American modernism with real conviction.
A major element in the rise of the abstract expressionist movement in the early forties was its rejection of the social art of the thirties. Both the American scene painters and the school of social realism were shunned as too folksy, superficial, and propagandistic. There was a general turn toward a more inward, subjective, and psychological view of art. Psychoanalysis supplanted socialism and populism as a source ofinspiration. In the early phase, abstract ex pressionism emphasized symbolism and myth; psychological archetypes replaced history and politics as appropriate subject matter for art.
This turn toward a more subjective and psychological art was greatly abetted by the influence of the French surrealists, who formed a significant part of the exiled European artists' community in New York during the war. It was one of the central beliefs of the surrealists that art should attempt to draw upon the unconscious depths of the psyche for its subjects, and toward this end they advocated a technique known as automatism as the most effective means of gaining access to the unconscious. This involved the temporary suspension of consciously planned composition in favor of improvisation and free association.
Automatism, both as an idea and as a technique, was seized upon by the abstract expressionists as a means of liberating their art from the obligation to deal with social and political subjects. Where they differed from the surrealists, however, was in their tendency to carry this automatist method into the realm of pure abstraction. As abstract expressionism developed in the late forties and fifties, Pollock, Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and others removed the last traces of legible symbolism from their canvases. Painting became completely abstract. It was as a movement in large-scale abstract painting—and as a mode of abstraction based largely on the automatist method—that the New York school made its international impact from the fifties onward.
The sculpture of the New York school did not have an impact equal to that of its painting. It was generally true of American art in the twentieth century that sculpture lagged behind painting in setting the pace of aesthetic innovation and artistic achievement. If Gaston Lachaise and Elie Nadelman, both European-born, were exceptions to the rule in the period between the wars, it was because of their special ability to revitalize the classical tradition of European figurative sculpture and give it an American accent.
The most original sculptor in the interwar period, however, was Alexander Calder, who had been trained as an engineer and developed his artistic gifts only after he moved to Paris in the late twenties. Drawing his inspiration from Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and other Parisian exponents of abstract art, Calder applied his engineering skills to the creation of a new sculptural genre called the mobile. It was an audacious innovation that won the artist a good deal of popularity in America after World War II. Another important sculptor to emerge in the early thirties was Isamu Noguchi, whose highly simplified abstract stone carvings reflected both his Japanese heritage and the influence of Constantin Brancusi, the leading modernist sculptor of his generation in Paris.
The preeminent sculptor of the abstract expressionist generation was David Smith. Beginning as a painter who looked to cubism, surrealism, and abstraction for his artistic ideas, Smith seized upon the methods of cubist collage as a means of creating open-form sculptural construction. Following the example of Picasso and Julio González, he adopted welded metal as his principal material, and it was he, more than any other sculptor of his generation, who made open-form welded sculpture—sometimes called "drawing in space"—a major genre. Although at times employing symbolic images in the manner of the abstract expressionist painters, Smith's sculpture was largely abstract. His achievement was immense; his was the most important body of modernist sculpture produced by an American in this century. But recognition of that achievement came more slowly to Smith than to the painters of the New York school. To the world at large, the New York school has always been identified with painting.
The United States had never before produced an art movement that had such an impact on the international art world, and it was inevitable that so powerful a movement would meet with opposition. The first attempt to supplant the authority of the abstract expressionists—and of abstraction itself as a mode of artistic expression—came in the late fifties in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, painters who reintroduced recognizable images and objects into paintings and collage-like constructions that still owed something to abstract expressionist methods. The images that were now incorporated into art—commonplace items like flags, targets, and maps in Johns's work, and junk materials like rubber tires and stuffed animals in Rauschenberg's—had a facetious quality that mocked the psychological and metaphysical gravity of abstract expressionism. This impulse toward mockery and irony proved to be the basis of one of the principal movements of the 1960s: pop art.
The pop art movement that erupted in New York in the early sixties in the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and others specialized in making the iconography of popular culture—advertising, comic strips, media images—the basis of painting and sculpture. This movement marked a decisive shift away from the inwardness and subjectivity of abstract expressionism, and it became immensely popular and influential. Yet it did not mark the end of abstraction as a dominant strain in American art, for there also emerged in the sixties two new schools of abstraction: color-field painting—notably in the work of Helen Frankenthaler—which refined and simplified the legacy of abstract expressionism in a style that focused on pure color; and minimalist painting and sculpture that favored more geometrical and impersonal forms.
As a result of these diverse and conflicting art movements of the sixties, no single style or movement any longer enjoyed a position of historically sanctioned dominance. American art was more openly eclectic than it had been at any time since the war, and no single school enjoyed the position of unrivaled leadership that had characterized the abstract expressionists in the fifties. Not only pop art and minimalism and color-field abstraction but a broad range of representational styles, including a revival of realism, now competed in an open field. New fashions in art turned up with increasing regularity—neoexpressionism, for example, was one of the sensations of the 1980s—but the American art scene was too big, too varied, too crowded with competing ideas, styles, and claims, for any single group or movement to prevail.
What had been permanently altered, too, was the notion of the modernist artist as an isolated and rejected figure in American cultural life. The visual arts had entered the cultural mainstream with an impact that gave every sign of being irreversible.
Dore Ashton, Modern American Sculpture (1968); Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (1955); Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970).
-Hilton Kramer/ college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_067102_iisincethear.htm
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