Good fella: Robert Storr on Irving Sandler

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While the first half of the book is given over to the glory days of a close-knit though fractious bohemia, the second half recounts the culture wars of an exponentially expanding system from the perspective of someone on the inside who hasn't forgotten what it felt like to be outside and is correspondingly determined to keep things open and moving in an increasingly stratified and ungenerous America. Traditional in some aesthetic matters but pluralist in his tastes and a staunch advocate of unqualified artistic freedom in the public domain, Sandler at seventy-eight is a liberal activist in a period largely given to radical critique without effective praxis. His youthful socialism may have given way to a pragmatic approach to cultural and political matters, but it would be hard to find anyone who has applied himself on more fronts to the task of defending the rights and improving the lot of "art workers" of all kinds--from the struggles at the NEA to cofounding Artists Space and convening panels on how artists should deal with the survival of their work after their deaths. His low-key manner and diplomatic approach do not preclude tart remarks about individuals with whom he has done battle or who he feels have betrayed the trust of artists, and in the last chapter he weighs his growing intellectual pessimism against basic self-acceptance and an unabated appetite for art, evidenced by an undiminished and, among his contemporaries, virtually unrivaled presence in galleries where new work is shown. If one can fault this book for anything, it is that this diplomatic stance leads to sometimes frustrating discretion about the messier parts of the world to which he has had privileged entree. David Sylvester, another unrepentant "art lover"--but unlike Sandler an ardent womanizer as well--was gossipy and sharp-tongued about his peers in private; but when he began summing up toward the end of his life, he, too, balked at telling all, or at any rate much, of what he really knew. To ask Sandler to do so would be to challenge an utterly decent man to act against his natural good manners. Still, time reduces the cost of complete candor, and one hopes that another Sandler memoir will eventually surface that will to some degree be for his generation what the journals of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were for theirs. At present, however, we should be very happy to have this one. There is plenty of juice in Sandler's stories, and readers should not complain that the one kind that's entirely missing is bile.

Robert Storr is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

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