‘His close-quarter observations of the artists that surrounded him and were his friends cannot be beaten and will be required reading for years to come’ – Art Monthly

‘Vivid and entertaining’ – ARTnews

‘Vivid testimony to life in what now seems an artistic golden age’ – The Sunday Telegraph

‘An absorbing memoir, as rich in perceptive criticism as in anecdote’ – The Scotsman

Irving Sandler has been a friend or acquaintance of virtually every important American artist of the postwar period, and his art criticism and books constitute the first and most comprehensive critical and historical account of this extraordinary time. There is no one else whose personal chronicle is also the living memory of the New York art world, from abstract expressionism to the present day.

Beginning in 1952, his memoir captures the anguished intensity of the period, with World War II an immediate memory and the imminence of nuclear disaster an everyday presence.

Here are striking encounters with Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and David Smith. He was also a witness to the heated critical warfare between Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. We watch the first generation of abstract expressionists succeeded by the artists of the 1960s – Stella, Rauschenberg and Johns – to be followed by pop and minimalism.

At every turn, there was Irving Sandler, intimately conversant with the art and artists.

In this vivid memoir, critical judgments and personal experience are uniquely intertwined. Readers will be captivated by the intelligence, the unassuming confidence and the sheer personableness that have kept Sandler at the centre of the art world for over half a century.

Irving Sandler’s four-volume history of postwar American art includes The Triumph of American Painting, The New York School, American Art of the 1960s and Art of the Postmodern Era. He is currently the Chairman of the Artists’ Advisory Committee of the Sharpe Foundation.

Also of interest
American Art Since 1945
Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose
At Work in Paris: Raymond Mason on Art and Artists
Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949 - 1962