Good fella: Robert Storr on Irving Sandler

A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir, by Irving Sandler. New York: Thames & Hudson. 382 pages. $30.

FIRST, FULL DISCLOSURE: I make a handful of brief appearances in this book, having known its author well for twenty years and having worked closely with him on several projects. This neither qualifies me nor disqualifies me to judge the writer or his account in any special way. Hundreds of people inside the New York art world and out could make the same claim. Many of them are mentioned in passing and some are discussed at length in these pages. Not all are famous, though numbers of them were famous but have since slipped into obscurity. That's the way it goes, and Sandler is nothing if not realistic about fashion, even as he remains respectful of the struggle artists endure to keep themselves and their work alive when public attention drifts or never quite arrives. Indeed, one of the pleasures of this memoir is that it remembers things and people otherwise lost in the shuffle, bringing forward a vivid and various cast of characters spanning more than half a century, and offering a fine, firsthand appreciation of the accomplishments, antagonisms, foibles, and failings of the hosts that made the scene Sandler has spent his life chronicling and celebrating.

The full-dress art-historical record he has drawn up is contained in four volumes published over the last quarter century: 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). Narrative, untheoretical--at times antitheoretical--and unapologetically focused not just on what happened in the United States but principally on what happened in Manhattan, Sandler's surveys have been widely criticized but even more widely used, not least because they are readable and deeply informed by their author's unrivaled access to the artists and art-worldings about whom he writes. No one has seen more exhibitions in New York galleries or sat on, or in on, as many panels for as many years. Nor has anyone more scrupulously set down what people said in such forums, at openings, or in intimate studio or bar conversations than Sandler. Name a painter, sculptor, curator, critic, or idea man or woman and he will have talked to them and made notes: Willem de Kooning (among his heroes) and Landes Lewitin (who's Lewitin, you ask? and you will find out); Alfred Barr (whose papers Sandler helped see into press) and Thomas B. Hess (the great editorial champion of Abstract Expressionism and Sandler's boss at Art News); Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Allan Kaprow (their combined efforts kicked the struts out from under AbEx, and Sandler, its scribe, was game enough to find out how and why).

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Then there are his art-critical nemeses: Clement Greenberg, Hilton Kramer, and Rosalind Krauss. Sandler's blunt assessment of the influence of their respective dogmas is a timely reminder of how the will to intellectual hegemony operates in a sphere of activity so given to unpredictable change as modern art, and how brief the reign of any dogma is. In this context Sandler, who grew up in modest surroundings and never affected the manner of his mandarin--or faux-mandarin--adversaries, writes like a street-smart reporter describing the workings of party bosses and machines in big-city art wards. If the abuse of power comes as no surprise, in Greenberg's case it nevertheless came in several forms. For Sandler, his meddling in the studio was as damning as his manipulations of the market. In fact, they were intimately linked, the first guaranteeing a product for the second:

  Clem's successful advocacy of Louis and Noland, and then of Jules
  Olitski and Anthony Caro, got him the reputation of being a
  "kingmaker." This attracted artists. So did his formalist dogma and
  the implication that the entire history of Western art funneled
  through the artists who accepted his dictation or, more specifically,
  painted according to his specifications.... I was willing to grant
  that artists might find Clem's theories useful, but the idea that he
  told artists how to "improve" their pictures ... appalled me.... Clem
  was also heeded by dealers and collectors. He would pander to the
  rich, assuring them that what counted in art was taste; everything
  else was incidental.... Clem himself was in "business."

Meanwhile the MO of Greenberg's rebellious disciples was simple enough: "Krauss and her colleagues used art theory to gain art-world power, and they were expert at playing art and academic politics. Krauss had been a disciple of Greenberg but later categorically rejected his formalist theory. She had, however, learned from him how to acquire tastemaking power: Assume an identifiable aesthetic position with a few identifiable premises, repeat them again and again, and apply them to a relatively few privileged artists. At the same time, identify an opposing aesthetic--modernism, in Krauss's case--and attack it vehemently or dismiss it contemptuously." Turning to the conservative Kramer's perennial attempts to get even with the succession of modernist and postmodernist avant-gardes from Abstract Expressionism on down, Sandler chronicles the role the former New York Times critic and New Criterion founder played in mobilizing public opinion against government support for the arts in the aftermath of the furor over Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. After recounting Kramer's successful campaign to shut off NEA grants to critics in the mid-'80s, Sandler turns to the reactionary commentator's campaign against peer-panel review, a system which insured that, rather than being handed down from on high by cultural bureaucrats or self-styled connoisseurs, grants to artists were fairly distributed to serious practitioners whose achievements were recognized by others in their field. Of Kramer's role in all of this Sandler unequivocally states, "It was shameful that Kramer's dead hand weighed so heavily on living American art."