ART NEWS, 1960 by Landis Lewitin Joop Sanders [Stuttman; Jan. 8-Feb. 6], who came to this country from the Netherlands twenty years ago, will have a one-man exhibition at the Stedelijke Museum, Amsterdam, just after this show. Working in and out of the Abstract-Expressionist tendency, his work shows a fervor for the sensuousness of paint and an elastic form that opens, doubles back, contracts and rests limpid, carrying in its involvements a sense of nature remembered. In Spring, one of the most memorable and evocative, forms move with a sense of upheaval. White, the dominating color, falls and flows with a gentle cascading motion, changing its density from passages of cool transluscence, through which a dark underpaint glimmers, to rests of greater opacity. Yellow greens, blues and bright yellows catch and halt momentarily the fall in a pattern like that of a slow waterfall. Its cadences are natural without being specific. Several smaller paintings [...]

HORIZON MAGAZINE, June 1981 Downtown in the Fifties by Hiram Carruthers Butler Joop Sanders was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1921. He arrived in New York and began studying drawing at the Art Students League with the German-American artist George Grosz, who had been a cofounder of the Dada movement. Sanders met Willem de Kooning in late 1942 and began frequenting the downtown cafeterias. When the Eighth Street Club was organized in 1949, Sanders was the youngest founding member. Sanders painting was unequivocally influenced by his fellow Dutch-American, de Kooning, in whose studio he worked for a short time 1945. Sanders first abstract work dates from his time with de Kooning. Pantagruel, 1955. is roughly painted and reflects abstract-expressionist Angst at its fullest. Yet, like its namesake from Rabelais’ work, it is also good-humored. American Commercial colors elevate the pitch and serve to delight. Along with the serious expression there is a capricious and fanciful, almost mocking stroke. In the mid-1950’s Sanders left New York For Europe. In I960 he was the [...]

ART NEWS, 1951 The 9th Street Show By Thomas B. Hess New York’s avant-garde [Ninth Street; to June 10] gathers spectacularly in a 90-foot former antique shop, newly whitewashed (by the exhibitors) for the occasion. An air of haphazard gaiety, confusion, punctuated by moments of achievement, reflects the organization of this mammoth show which, according to one of the organizers, “just grew.” Some pictures were chosen by the artist himself; others picked by small delegations of colleagues. A few entries were accepted because “so-and-so” is “such a nice fellow”; a few because “such-and-such” was a “great help”; several for no conceivable reason whatsoever. Some out-of-town guests were invited; some in-town ones were simply forgotten; a number decided to make their absences conspicuously felt. But such hi-or-miss informality and enthusiasm has resulted in a fine and lively demonstration of modern abstract painting in and around New York—or, more properly, Greenwich Village. Authoritative statements come from De Kooning, Pollock, Franz Kline, Tworkov, Hofmann, Kerkam, [...]

ART INTERNATIONAL Joop Sanders by Kenneth B. Sawyer Those riches are more than imagined in the paintings of Joop Sanders, they are activated into movement. Joop Sanders is that rare combination of European respect for craft and American impatience with it. In the earlier works one had the sense that his métier was the final impediment of pure expression; the new work has come free, has rejected the attrition of the built surface. Sanders has approached the Erebus of direct expression: it is almost as if nothing supervenes between man and canvas. To experience a Sanders oil---they are less seen than felt --- is to experience the supreme sensualism of the curve. Interpret it as you will, the curve, the weights and valuations that control it, is the feminine form (or perhaps the form of the earth itself). Joop Sanders’ painting is basic and ambitious; he has achieved his aims. Only a true artist could build so much [...]

ART NEWS, March 1987 Joop Sanders at Alfred Kren By John Sturman SANDERS, who was born in Holland in 1921, emigrated to the United States and helped spearhead the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Although Sanders has not achieved the fame of his former colleagues, he has produced an impressive body of work that deserves to be better known. 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’ monochromatism 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 [...]

ART IN AMERICA, 1987 Joop Sanders at Alfred Kren By Lawrence Campbell When the Eight Street Artists’ Club began in 1949, Joop Sanders was the youngest charter member. He was in Europe by the mid-1950s, returning to New York in 1959. By then his work had become almost one color, a wall of light, a mysteriously glowing color field. In 1960 he had a one-man show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (his birthplace); his work was judged by critics and connoisseurs to be a paradigm of the new American art. The present exhibition was in two parts that occupied two rooms. The first room contained work from the early 1960s, the second, painting from the 1980s. A handsome 1982 tondo, Dream of the Red Chamber, was the only fairly large work in the entire show. The works from the ‘60s consisted of paintings rather smaller than those I remember vividly from the period. In those shown, snakelike “lines” [...]