Can I get a witness?

A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir, by Irving Sandler, New York, Thames & Hudson, 2003; 384 pages, $29.95 hardcover.

If the art world were like baseball, Irving Sandler, in his late 70s, energetic and indomitable as ever, would possess the record (probably in perpetuity) for most consecutive games played. The author of the standard history of Abstract Expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting, as well as three other valuable accounts of the art that followed--The New York School, American Art of the 1960s and Art of the Postmodern era, Sandler, it seems, has missed absolutely nothing public (and few things private) relating to contemporary art in New York for the last 50 years. In addition, he has known almost every significant postwar artist and critic, as well as myriad lesser lights. I sometimes feel--and my experience on this score is hardly unique--that I have never been to an opening, a panel discussion or a symposium without finding Irving present, actively engaged and, as is clear from his new memoir, A Sweeper-Up After Artists, thoroughly enjoying himself. (The title comes from a Frank O'Hara poem in which Sandler is referred to as "the balayeur des artistes").

Although Sandler's deepest sympathies lie with the Abstract Expressionists, both the artists of the first generation and his own later contemporaries, he shows no lack of curiosity and enthusiasm for the art being made right now. If them is something to see or, almost better, something to be talked about, he'll be there. While A Sweeper-Up After Artists is not exactly a work of art history--it's too personal and discursive for that--it is not an autobiography either, at least in the confessional sense. Except for the drama of finding a vocation, Sandler doesn't let us in on much in his private life. It's the art that counts.

Sandler started out studying for a Ph.D. in American history at Columbia, lost his taste for the subject and found himself at loose ends. This rootlessness was not to last, for in 1952, while walking through the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, he chanced upon Franz Kline's 1950 black-and-white gestural abstraction Chief and, as he recounts, had one of those strike you-dumb, life-changing experiences. Art had played virtually no role in his life until then, and even though be was unprepared for what the Kline did to him, he was clearly ready for something to deeply engage him. He says:

What was it, then, in Kline's Chief that stunned and moved me? The painting did not provide may particular pleasure or delight. Nor did I "understand" it. I responded in another way--with my "gut," as it were. The painting had a sense of urgency that gripped me. I sensed Kline's need to create something deeply felt. That spoke to my own need. Moreover, Chief had a disturbing edge, a certain rawness, disorientation, lack of balance that reflected my predicament (and later, I would think, that of mankind). It was at once surprising, familiar, and imposing. And it challenged me to find out more about it and my experience of it.

He rose to that challenge. Putting aside his studies--he got his doctorate in art history two decades later--Sandler plunged into the art world of the mid-'50s. He worked as a critic for Art News and later the New York Post, and over the years contributed to almost all of the journals. He also held down two important posts in the '50s and early '60s-director of a 10th Street cooperative gallery, the Tanager, and manager of the Club, an artist-founded hotbed of discussion, dissension and polemic. These understandings put him in the center of things. While the advanced art world then was considerably smaller than it is now, the range of approaches narrower, the artists more accessible to each other and the financial rewards much smaller, this did not mean that peace and harmony reigned. There was a good deal of camaraderie, but people took their art very, very seriously. Sandler gives the reader a real feel for a milieu where art was talked about incessantly, where existential angst and tragic aspirations were almost givens, and where authenticity, proper motivation and largeness of feeling counted heavily.

In such an atmosphere, it was expected that sides were to be taken and lines drawn. Sandler aligned himself with the de Kooning wing of gestural painting and found a sympathetic critical environment at Tom Hess's Art News. He also became a lifelong partisan of a group of younger New York School artists--Al Held, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero and Ronald Bladen. History has certainly validated his confidence in them.

Advocacy and defense of one's point of view sometimes spilled over into grudges and feuds. Sandler details the particularly nasty one between Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. Though they were at first close friends working in similar artistic veins, Reinhardt committed the apparently unforgivable sin of including Newman in one of his cartoons satirizing the art. world. Newman mind for libel, and the battle was on. Sandler, always the diplomat, tried to be friends with both. It didn't work. He wrote an article on Reinhardt, which Newman deemed bad enough, but he compounded his offense by comparing the two artists' paintings. Newman never spoke to him again.