Minimalism, Zero & other art groups, Animals in Art, Sandler art critic

The Intellectual Origins of Minimalism
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/minimalism
The Intellectual Origins of Minimalism

My Cat Could Do That: A Brief History of Animals in Contemporary Art

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/history-of-animals-in-art

How the Zero Group Became One of Art History's Most Viral Movements
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/zero-group
Contemporaneous to Zero were various avant-garde movements in Europe and Asia, as well as North and South America, that found common aesthetic cause with the German movement. These included the Holland's Nul (Armando, Jan Henderikse, Jan Schoonhoven, herman de vries), France's Nouveaux Réalistes (Arman, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri), Italy's Azimuth (Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani), and Japan's Gutai group (Jirô Yoshihara, Shozo, Shimamoto, Kazuo, Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, among others); the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and America's George Rickey also formed individual nodes in the orbit of Zero's influence.

Know Your Critics: What Did Irving Sandler Do?

Know Your Critics: What Did Irving Sandler Do?

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/what-did-irving-sandler-do


Irving Sandler is an artists’ art historian. In contrast to other prominent midcentury art critics—like the New York Times’s John Canaday, who warned him against fraternizing with artists for fear of impairing his critical distance—Sandler purposefully immersed himself in his subjects' milieu, first in his days as a young reviewer for Artnews and later as an art historian. Summing up his writing career in 2006, Sandler proudly wrote: “The thread that runs through my writing is a concern for the intentions, visions, and experiences of artists.”

WHAT DID HE DO?sandler backdrop

Irving Sandler considers his lifework to be his four-volume history of the art of his time, which he began writing in the 1950s and carried through to the early 1990s. The first book was to be titled A History of Abstract Expressionism, until the Book of the Month Club requested 10,000 copies from his publisher—on the condition that it had a “livelier title.” Thus “A History” became The Triumph of American Painting. And the tome is not as dogmatic as its title implies. Sandler’s goal has never been to stake out his own stance on new art but rather, as once said, citing Woodrow Wilson, “to reflect ‘the sympathy of a man who stands in the midst and see like one within, not like one without, like a native, not like an alien.”

The Triumph of American Painting is a work of participatory, living historical activity. Most of his research was artist-based, a fact he makes clear in the book’s acknowledgements: “My first debt is to those artists who generously submitted to interviews, engaged willingly in lengthy discussions, and searched hard for answers to specific questions.” It's not unusual for an art historian or critic to mingle with artists; it is unusual for an art historian to turn those interactions and the firsthand knowledge that results into the basis for scholarship. This was Sandler’s gift. As he explained, it allowed him to deal “with artists’ intentions precisely in order to capture the embryonic period in the development of their styles—before they were assimilated into art history.” (Sandler admits he did not know the artists of the remaining three volumes as well as he did the artists in Triumph, since “given the number, it was not feasible.”)

In the Abstract Expressionist period of the 1950s, when the principle artists made up a small community in New York, Sandler ingratiated himself with them by showing up at their hangouts—first the Cedar Street Tavern then the Club on Eighth Street—for more socializing and discussions. He befriended artist great and minor, and was purposefully “inclusive,” even in his writing, but he came to develop his own personal "pantheon" of favorites. These included: Mark Rothko, Philip Guston (“Philip would say again and again—as if he had never said it before—that everything in a work of his had to be ‘felt’”), Franz Kline (he “held court at the Cedar Street Tavern almost every night after ten”), David Smith, Tony Smith, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofman (“I always admired Hans’ painting and believe that certain of his pictures—Lava and Agrigento come to mind—must be numbered among the greatest abstract expressionist canvases”), Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still (“as a de Kooning man, it took me time to appreciate Still’s innovation”). Sandler’s “pals” included: Alex Katz (they’re still friends today), Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, Mark di Suvero.