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 pass. But Joop Sanders’ ambition to be a painter did. Although it took him a year and a half to get to art school, the result of disentangling himself from his family and surviving a bad traffic accident, he finally managed to enroll, at 18, in the class of George Grosz at the Art Students League of New York. Grosz, born in Berlin and part of the Dada movement there after World War I, was well-known in Europe for his savage caricatural drawings and paintings. “I happened to like Grosz’s early work,” Joop said. One of Sanders’ earliest works in America shows the direct influence of Grosz’s masterly draftsmanship. In Self-portrait, which dates to the early 1940s, Sanders’ painstakingly modelled body is naked to the waist, his face a study in stillness over his slender torso below. His penetrating gaze seems to peer inward, not outward.
The drawing was full of promise—as, indeed, was the Art Students League itself. Many famous artists had taught in the grand, 19th-century French Renaissance building on West 57th Street in Manhattan. And many famous artists of the future would study there—Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg, among them. That fall, however, as war engulfed Europe, Joop left to fight in the Dutch army. But active duty brought on a recurrence of the life-threatening tuberculosis that he had suffered as a child, and he was discharged and returned to New York, re-enrolling in Grosz’s class. That, as it proved, was only a temporary move. His real career, in the downtown art world of New York, was about to begin…
Excerpt from exhibition catalogue, Joop Sanders: The Last Abstract Expressionist, 2025
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Annalyn Swan is the author, with Mark Stevens, of de Kooning: An American Master and Francis Bacon: Revelations. Their biography of de Kooning won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. A graduate of Princeton University and of King’s College, Cambridge, which she attended on a Marshall Scholarship, Swan is the former arts editor of Newsweek. She teaches biography and memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center and at Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. She and Stevens are currently at work on a biography of the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.