ARTS, 1960
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.
Artnews, 1961
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
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 [...]
Art News, 1960
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
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
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, [...]