Kaleidoscope by Mark Stevens In Western society, art is often treated as a competition. Did Ingres or Delacroix first plant his flag on the Parisian mountaintop? Did Courbet race past them both? Who won Matisse Picasso, the huge exhibit staged in 2003 at the Museum of Modern Art? Was the main man after the war Pollock or de Kooning? This rivalrous perspective never suited Joop Sanders, a highly accomplished painter with a curious, skeptical, and open mind who, while keenly aware of the jostle for position, never tried to create a brand. Sanders was too well read in the history of art merely to chase after the big cats; and he never remained for too long in one style. His changeable practice was conscious and intentional, a way to stay fresh and to transform the evolving traditions of his time into his private “variations on a theme.” In some ways, [...]

Perpetual Motion by Peter Halley Joop Sanders (born 1921) personifies the ideal of an artist’s artist. From his earliest years, he was a consummate virtuoso, with an unerring eye for both composition and the possibilities of oil paint. He led a life full of friends and his love for his family. He was bold, following his own instincts, moving back and forth between Holland and the United States as necessity demanded. He never fit into any preconceived notion of how an artist’s work should develop and never bowed to commercialism. He brought to the artworld of his time a deep love of culture and literature and the sophistication of a truly transatlantic outlook...  Excerpt from exhibition catalogue, Joop Sanders: The Last Abstract Expressionist, 2025 -- Peter Halley is an artist living in New York City. He came to prominence as a central figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s. Halley is also known [...]

The Last Abstract Expressionist by Annalyn Swan On February 7, 1939, a biting winter day in New York, a 17-year-old Dutch teenager walked down the gangplank of the SS Volendam, newly docked in the Hudson River—“an easel in one hand and my neckties, which I had neglected to pack, all stuck in the pocket of my raincoat.” Officially—in the version of his story told for his parents’ benefit—Joop Sanders had come to the New World to learn cinematography from his uncle, director of a film company in New York City. Unofficially, he was already determined to be a painter: “My parents didn’t know that, or it probably would have been a stress point.” The easel gave away the game to his relatives, however. So did his somewhat raffish look. “As I came off the gangplank my aunt’s son-in-law said, “That’s obviously a Bolshevik.” The Bolshevik prediction never came to [...]

NEW YORK TIMES By Joseph Masheck Nov. 14, 1986 (Through Nov. 29.) Joop Sanders (Alfred Krem, 22 East 65th Street): It is nice to see somebody stick to his guns and have the world catch up. Joop (pronounced ''Yope'') Sanders came to New York from Amsterdam in 1939 as a teen-ager; 10 years later, he was the youngest founding member of ''The Club,'' of those most radical painters of the day, the Abstract Expressionists. We would probably know him better by now if he hadn't been back in Europe during the later 50's. In sampling two separate decades, the 60's and the 80's, this exhibition provokes a bracing double take. First comes a glowing roomful of paintings, each practically a monochrome but divided into rounded zones, from 1962 and 1963. Here a spiritual purity akin to Ad Reinhardt's, though more lyrical, makes itself felt. Then, in another room, are works of the present, some on paper startlingly like paintings by that compatriot of Sanders', Willem de Kooning. In a different vein, two small canvases, ''Pogrom'' (1984) and ''Interrogation Room'' (1986), would be morally serious even without the titles. Toughly sensitive and in more than one sense reviving are some small [...]

TREFFPUNKT PARNASS, Wuppertal 1949-1965 SANDERS Joop, born in 1922 in Amsterdam, lives in New York. 1939 : Emigrated to New York. Short studies with George Grosz, Member of the artists' group «The Club», New York. 1950 : «Ninth Street Exhibition» first exhibition of the New York School. At the beginning of the 50s he goes to Europe. 1960 : returns to New York. Exhibition at the Galerie Parnass, I960.' « Tenth street» oil on canvas, 74 x 57 cm, 1960. Collage, paper on canvas, 54 x 42 cm, 1960.

ARTS MAGAZINE, 1965 By Jacob Grossberg Joop Sanders: Sanders is a geometric painter somewhat akin to Kelly, but more complicated. There is the same play between the figure and ground, though Sanders uses bits and pieces of color which often lack the inevitability necessary to make this kind of geometry work. His best pieces are the simplest—black and white forms: stark, formal, commanding paintings. In these, he is a fine artist. (Bertha Schaefer.)—J. G. Arts Magazine Sept-Oct 1965 P. 68  

ARTS, 1960 By Sidney Tillim Joop Sanders: After three and a half years abroad, one in Spain and two in his native Holland, Sanders has returned relatively free of his dependency on De Kooning that was so marked in his work before 1955. But his more personal style reveals for all its visceral formations a fairly restricted range of color and form. A sprawling, glandular white shape is freely countered by a complementary in green. These are easily followed through a number of improvisations, possibly because they are painted rather conventionally, so that the likelihood of fortuitous accidents is reduced. Only when he repairs to the action repertoire, threading a sluggish blue line among sliding chunks of white (Waterways), does true variety appear. Sanders will have a one-man show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam next March.   (Stuttman, Jan. 9-Feb. 5.)—S.T.  

ART NEWS, 1961 by Lawrence Campbell Elise Asher, Budd Hopkins, Joop Sanders [Stuttman; to Jan. 31] are well-known in New York’s avant-garde circles. Each works distinctively and rather mysteriously. Miss Asher paints free concentrations of small color shapes which flutter, like birds, within a whitened space. Hopkins constructs forms which suggest a gate, a window or an opening into a world beyond the colored expanse of his picture. Sanders’ works have to do with a relentless power. His paintings are very slow-moving, like the shift of a glacier. He pushes his undulating tides, all one color or nearly one, against one another. He works with very limited means, but the paintings are not limited emotionally. Prices unquoted.   ArtNews 1961 Page 17 Lawrence Campbell

ART NEWS, 1987 by John Sturman This show, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 1968, focused on paintings and drawings from two discrete periods—the ’60s and the ’80s. Most of the ’60s works offered nearly monochromatic fields of primary color. Sanders’ mono-chromatism is far more akin to the emotionality of Rothko than to the precise evenness of Newman. Summer Heat (1962), for example, features an expanse of bold, dense brushstrokes of deep yellow, with a thin white circle outlined at the lower left. Its hazy, mustardlike thickness says, with almost oriental simplicity, all one ever needs to know about the feel of oppressive days in July and August. In a similar fashion Blue Eclipse (1962) and Moonlite Night (1962) evoke a profound and enigmatic nocturnal ultramarine stillness. Sisyphus (1963), consisting of the outlines of two opposing triangles and a circle on a black field, neatly sums up the tension and futility that characterize the task of the mythological titan. The ’80s paintings were a more disparate group, and, although they are strikingly different from the near [...]