REVIEWS2023-02-20T16:56:14+00:00

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, [...]

Art International

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, 1987

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

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” [...]

STEDELIJK MUSEUM

STEDELIJK MUSEUM SHOW Essay by Thomas B. Hess, 1960 It was in 1948 that I first met the advanced painters and sculptors who a decade later were to become famous as the “New York School”. And it was then that I was introduced to Joop Sanders and I was told that Joop was painting in a new style. Later I saw his pictures in some of the huge lively exhibitions the artists themselves organized in empty lofts and stores (no one in New York with the exception of Pollock was selling any paintings). At the time Sanders was obviously influenced by de Kooning and as it turned out this influence was the healthiest, the most open and stimulating of the moment as many of Sanders’ young colleagues can testify. They went on to discover or invent some of the most original forms of the 1950’s. Shortly thereafter Sanders went to [...]

ARTnews

ARTNEWS Review, Isca Greenfield-Sanders John Berggruen December 2005 This series of ten large-scale “Beach Detail Paintings” (2005) by New York artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders offered a breath of fresh air. The artist based these works on snapshots of family vacations from the 1950s and ‘60s, taken from slides that she purchased at a yard sale. She scanned the slides, pared them down to a few select details, enlarged the images, and then printed each section on a sheet of rice paper. She then assembled the pages and used oils and watercolor to give the images her own vibrant color, rich texture, and crisp translucence. The artist painted several of the same images in both pink and blue color schemes. Yellow Butt Beach is a study of light at low tide. In the pink version, coral hues are reflected in calm surf as a figure in yellow swim trunks crouches beneath a [...]

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