Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. vii)
• Introduction (p. ix)
• 1 The Milieu of the New York School in the Early Fifties (p. 1)
• 2 The Community of the New York School (p. 29)
• 3 the Colonization of Gesture Painting (p. 46)
• 8 The Duchamp - Cage Aesthetic (p. 163)
• 12 The Recognition of the Second Generation (p. 256)
• 13 The New Academy (p. 278)
• 14 Circa 1960: a Change in Sensibility (p. 290)
• Appendix B Second-Generation Artists, Dates and Places of Birth, Art Education, and One-Person Shows in New York, 1950-1960 (p. 322)
• Bibliography (p. 326)
• List of Illustrations (p. 345)
• Index (p. 355)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

In The Triumph of American Painting (1970), Sandier described the development of the Abstract-Expressionist artists--Pollock, de Kooning, Hofmann foremost--collectively known as the New York School; how that ""loose community"" dissolved into warring camps is the subject of the present, somewhat mistitled study, which takes in diverse artistic tendencies and the vanguard outside New York. Sandler's strengths--appropriate to a chronicler who is not primarily a critic--are lineage, citation, and social setting. He explains the split between total-modernist Pollock (""I am nature"") and tradition-minded de Kooning (""I feel very close to Ingres and Tintoretto""); the hostility of the pioneers and their champions to the non-gestural art of a Barnett Newman; the opposition of the abstractionists in general to the re-emergence of realism (in Larry Rivers or Alex Katz); the overall New-York-School antipathy toward junk-material assemblage (Stankiewicz, Rauschenberg) as ""an anti-art joke""; and so on. . . to the flat, static, ""simple-minded"" heresy of Frank Stella. Unfortunately, however, he also tends to see individual artists chiefly--and schematically--in relation to their predecessors and contemporaries: abstractionist Sam Francis' style, for instance, owes ""its fluidity to Gorky and Rothko, its airiness and luminosity to Rothko, and its all-overness and unbounded expansion to Still, Monet, and to a lesser degree Pollock and Tobey."" But, in compensation, there are the quoted judgments of Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Thomas Hess, Harold Rosenberg--not only observers but, as Sandler points out, embattled participants. He was on the spot too, as an activist in the focal Eighth Street Club, and it's this that gives his book a sense of engagement beyond its inherent authority. Here's an art that, as it seemed at the time, existed to be talked about--at the expense of an art that also exists uniquely to be seen and experienced. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Irving Sandler was born in Brooklyn, New York on July 22, 1925. He enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of 17 and was sent to Franklin and Marshall College for an officer training program. He spent the rest of World War II with a stateside radar unit. After leaving the Marines in 1946 with the rank of second lieutenant, he received a bachelor's degree from Temple University in 1948 and a master's degree in American studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950.

He became the manager of the Tanager Gallery, an important artists' cooperative, in 1956. He also became the programming coordinator for the Artists' Club, a weekly symposium attended by most of the major artists of the period. He started writing reviews for ArtNews in 1956 and was the magazine's senior critic until 1962. He also wrote for Art International and was a critic at The New York Post from 1960 to 1964. He taught at New York University and later at Purchase College, from which he retired in 1997.

He wrote numerous books including The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, American Art of the 1960s, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, and Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation. He wrote two memoirs entitled A Sweeper-Up After Artists and Swept Up by Art: An Art Critic in the Post-Avant-Garde Era, a selection of his critical essays entitled From Avant-Garde to Pluralism: An On-the-Spot History, and a novel entitled Goodbye to Tenth Street. He received a lifetime achievement award by the International Association of Art Critics in 2008. He died from cancer on June 2, 2018 at the age of 92.

(Bowker Author Biography)