Irving Sandler was born in Brooklyn, New York on July 22, 1925. He enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of 17 and was sent to Franklin and Marshall College for an officer training program. He spent the rest of World War II with a stateside radar unit. After leaving the Marines in 1946 with the rank of second lieutenant, he received a bachelor's degree from Temple University in 1948 and a master's degree in American studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950.
He became the manager of the Tanager Gallery, an important artists' cooperative, in 1956. He also became the programming coordinator for the Artists' Club, a weekly symposium attended by most of the major artists of the period. He started writing reviews for ArtNews in 1956 and was the magazine's senior critic until 1962. He also wrote for Art International and was a critic at The New York Post from 1960 to 1964. He taught at New York University and later at Purchase College, from which he retired in 1997.
He wrote numerous books including The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, American Art of the 1960s, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, and Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation. He wrote two memoirs entitled A Sweeper-Up After Artists and Swept Up by Art: An Art Critic in the Post-Avant-Garde Era, a selection of his critical essays entitled From Avant-Garde to Pluralism: An On-the-Spot History, and a novel entitled Goodbye to Tenth Street. He received a lifetime achievement award by the International Association of Art Critics in 2008. He died from cancer on June 2, 2018 at the age of 92.
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