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Irving Sandler (born 1925) is an American art critic. He has provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, particularly around the abstract expressionist circles of the 1950s, where he managed the Downtown Tanager Gallery and co-ordinated the New York artists' 'Club' from 1955 to its demise in 1962 (see Sandler; 'A sweeper-up After Artists' Thames and Hudson 2003) as well as documenting numerous conversations from the Cedar Tavern. Sandler saw himself as an impartial observer of this period, as opposed to polemical advocates such as Clement Greenberg or Harold Rosenberg. He started writing art criticism at the behest of Thomas B. Hess for Art news in the mid 1950s.

He has curated several critically acclaimed exhibitions including 'The Prospect Mountain Sculpture Show' in upstate New York at Lake George overlooking David Smith's Bolton Landing residence in 1977 (Sandler 2003) and the Concrete Expressionism show in 1965 at New York University featuring the work of painters Al Held and Knox Martin and the sculptors Ronald Bladen, George Sugarman and David Weinrib. Many American artists have been interviewed by Sandler, including first generation abstract expressionists such as Robert Motherwell in 1957 and later pop protagonists such as Tom Wesselmann in 1984. In the 1970s he was co-founder of Artists Space which showed Judy Pfaff, Chuck Close, and helped launch the careers of Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman amongst others.

Sandler continues to write, and is concerned with allowing certain aspects of New York painting to be reassessed, as in his recent work on Esteban Vicente (2007), and has recently published a volume entitled 'Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: a Reevaluation', Hudson Hills Press, 2009 (see also Irving Sandler, interview in Brooklyn Rail, jul-Aug 2006).

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Irving Sandler", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0