ART

THE LAST ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST

JUNE 3, 2026

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INTRODUCTION

by TIMOTHY
GREENFIELD-SANDERS

@tgs

ESSAY

by PETER HALLEY

ARTWORK

by JOOP SANDERS 

PORTRAIT

by TIMOTHY
GREENFIELD-SANDERS

Joop Sanders in 1980. Photo ©Timothy Greenfield-Sanders,

Joop Sanders (born 1921) personifies the ideal of an artist’s artist. From his earliest years, he was a consummate virtuoso, with an unerring eye for both composition and the possibilities of oil paint. He led a life full of friends and his love for his family. He was bold, following his own instincts, moving back and forth between Holland and the United States as necessity demanded. He never fit into any preconceived notion of how an artist’s work should develop and never bowed to commercialism. He brought to the artworld of his time a deep love of culture and literature and the sophistication of a truly transatlantic outlook.

The year is 1939. Joop was a 17-year-old teenager, raised in Amsterdam, the child of a bourgeois Jewish family. Throughout his childhood, he was plagued by illness, including tuberculosis. At this young age, he has begun to paint, reads voraciously, and was tutored at home, becoming fluent in French, German, and English. It is hard to imagine that this sickly child will live to the age of 101.

According to Karin Greenfield-Sanders, the artist’s daughter, this thoughtful, precocious youth, sensing the dire situation in Europe, decides to leave for the United States, urging the rest of his family to do the same. They declined. In January 1939, he sailed alone for New York, where his father’s sister and her husband were already living. 

In May 1940, the Nazis would invade Holland. Sanders’ extended family in Amsterdam suffered horrendous loss. In 1942, the Nazis began the deportation of Holland’s Jews. Joop’s three sisters and his parents were forced into hiding. Because of Holland’s extensive census records, and despite widespread resistance to the Nazis, only 27% of Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust, compared to 75% of those in France. 

Among the victims was Sanders’ oldest sister, Carla, who was murdered at the Sobibor extermination camp in eastern Poland on May 14th, 1943. Her death would haunt her brother for the rest of his life. 

Arriving in New York, Joop Sanders immediately began to immerse himself into New York’s artworld. This precocious teenager had an uncanny knack for seeking out what was new and interesting. He enrolled in George Grosz’s drawing class at the Art Students League in the fall of 1940. (One wonders if the multi-lingual Sanders conversed with his instructor in German.) 

Pantagruel, 1958, oil on canvas, 47” x 43”

Persian, 1959, oil on canvas, 80” x 60”

“As a result of the cornucopia of artist friends Joop had already developed, at the tender age of 28, he became the youngest founding member of The Club, the Abstract Expressionist debating society located in a space at 39 East 8th Street.”

In 1942, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art where he met the equally young and talented Frank O’Hara, who then introduced him to the downtown poetry and dance scene.

During his time at the Art Students League, Joop met the de Koonings and became a life-long friend of both Elaine and Willem. While Willem was 

seventeen years Joop’s senior and would be a major influence on the younger artist’s Abstract Expressionist work, Elaine, born in 1918, was only three years older than Joop, and was the first of his many friends among the younger cohort of Abstract Expressionist painters, including Milton Resnick (born 1917), Ibram Lassaw, and Conrad Marca-Relli (both 1913).

In 1944, Joop began sharing Elaine de Kooning’s studio space, apparently getting along amicably with his colorful and opinionated friend. Joop and Elaine frequently painted each other’s portraits, including Joop’s remarkable portrait of Elaine, included in the catalogue and exhibition.    

Also in 1943, the young Joop made another uncannily interesting move when he got a job as a waiter at Romany Marie’s restaurant in the West Village. Romany Marie, whose full name was Marie Marchand, a Jewish immigrant from Romania, had since 1910 been proprietor of a series of bistros that were frequented by the writers and artists of downtown New York. Before the war, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and playwright Eugene O’Neil were among her beloved customers.

By the time Joop worked there, her regulars included Buckminster Fuller and his good friend Isamu Noguchi, as well as David Smith, Arshille Gorky, and John Graham, all of whom were to be instrumental in the nascent Abstract Expressionist movement. It is intriguing to imagine whom the charismatic 22-year-old, multi-lingual Joop would have first met there. 

The Lake, 1959, oil on canvas, 96” x 116”

Spring, 1950, oil on linen, 78.5” x 59”

As a result of the cornucopia of artist friends Joop had already developed, at the tender age of 28, he became the youngest founding member of The Club, the Abstract Expressionist debating society located in a space at 39 East 8th Street. It is worth quoting from a description of The Club, written by Critic Thomas Hess in 1962. After Hess describes the intense behavior of various artists in attendance, he goes on to recount the presence of Joop and his spouse-to-be, lieder singer Isca Vincent-Jörgensen:   

I also recall that usually sitting right in front of me would be a couple quietly holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes and smiling at some gentle private joke.

No detail could better summon the quiet sophistication and serenity of these two extraordinary people than Hess’s vivid anecdote.

As soon as the war ended in 1945, Joop hurriedly returned to Europe to see his family. As a favor to de Kooning, Joop visited de Kooning’s mother and sister who were enormously grateful for first hand news from America. In 1955, now married to Isca Sanders-Jörgensen, and with their two young children, Karin and John, in tow, Joop moved back to Amsterdam, for five years. This period of his life was as lively as his early New York years. The family spent time in Majorca, he had solo shows in Holland, Paris, and London, and even exhibited with the Zero Group in Milan. The crowning moment of his European years was a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1960.

Yet these years in Europe perhaps explain why Sanders’ work did not become known to a wider public in the United States. His time in Europe coincided with the heyday of the Abstract Expressionist movement when artists of his generation such as Joan Mitchell and his friend Milton Resnick first established their reputations in the increasingly thriving New York galleries. 

While Sanders is most identified with his early participation in Abstract Expressionist movement, including his friendship with Willem de Kooning and his status as the youngest founding member of The Club, his Abstract Expressionist paintings only represent the first phase of his career extending only until the mid-1950s.

Summer Heat, 1962, oil on canvas, 80” x 60”

Sanders’ work, from the very start was characterized by an extraordinary painterly intelligence and expressive intensity as demonstrated by such paintings as Portrait of Elaine de Kooning,1946, and Black Witch, 1956-1957. 

Like the paintings of his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, Sanders’ works of these years are riddled with angst and pain, all the more viscerally felt in light of his sister’s murder at the hands of the Nazis.

Yet, by the time of his Stedelijk exhibition in 1960, that sense of angst had disappeared. Persian and Everglades, both 1959 express a sense of joy and embrace flowering natural form through rich hues, combined with delicate pastels, and broad open areas of luminous white paint. Further any trace of de Kooningesque cubistic space and slashing brushstrokes have been banished, replaced instead by exclusively curvilinear forms, moving towards the Apollonian balance that the artist, now in his late 30s, would achieve in his mature years. 

The paintings in the Stedelijk exhibition were the result of a gradual evolution while he was working in Europe from 1955 - 1959. During that period Sanders produced oil paintings and numerous collages. He also experimented with black and white lithographs that were dominated by improvisational curvilinear brushwork reminiscent of Pollock’s late work from the same period. It is probable that he was looking at the work of the artists of the COBRA movement who were based in Holland, Belgium and Denmark. Since many of them were close to Sanders in age, it is entirely possible that the sociable Sanders knew some of them personally.

Sanders’ new interest in lyrical color and organic form parallels the use of these elements in many of the COBRA artists, particularly Pierre Alechinsky and Karel Appel. But unlike the work of the COBRA artists, Sanders’ paintings remained resolutely abstract — and American in their expansive scale. The airiness of his paintings is also very much in contrast to the horror vacui that dominates most COBRA painting, and instead offer affinities to the lyrical paintings that Sam Francis and Helen Frankenthaler were developing in these years in opposition to the existentialist gloom of Abstract Expressionism. 

MLK Black Icon, 1968, acrylic on linen, 36” x 28”

Interaction (BW), 1965, acrylic on canvas, 72” x 60”

“Sanders described his paintings as ‘creating a modulated monochromatic field.’ He also described the rhythm and forms

as ‘organic (...)’”

In 1959, Joop Sanders and his family moved back to New York City. 

His return led to a further evolution in Sanders’ work. By 1962, in his show 

at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery (Schaefer was a Bauhaus-influenced 

furniture designer), Sanders’ paintings had evolved into luminous, painterly 

monochromes in which curvilinear forms and circles are inscribed by 

allowing the lightly colored underpainting to show through the richly colored 

surface, an approach reminiscent of Matisse’s technique of leaving the 

underpainting exposed to create shapes in The Red Studio, which Sanders 

had doubtless seen at MoMA. (MoMA acquired the painting in 1949 after 

which it became a touchstone for such New York School painters as 

Barnett Newman.) Kerygma (red), 1962, can specifically be viewed as a 

homage to Matisse’s masterpiece. 

In a statement of 1962, Sanders described his paintings as “creating a 

modulated monochromatic field.” He also described the rhythm and forms 

as “organic,” but the curves in these paintings were increasingly becoming 

more measured and, with the introduction of the circle, Sanders was 

clearly moving in the direction of idealized, abstract geometric form, divorced from the variations of the natural world.

He seems to have codified this direction immediately following his 1965 show in the small 20 by 30-inch painting of the same year, Perpetual Motion, in which he turns to a hard-edge technique in keeping with his move into idealized geometric form. 

Sanders continued in this direction throughout the 1960s, producing paintings that are lyrical, playful and witty, the circle taking center stage in combination with measured curves and ruled lines as the supporting cast. Dutch Bride, 1965, is a wonderful example of this play of circles and curves. The title implies that Sanders may be thinking of his illustrious predecessor, Mondrian; while the sensuous interplay of curvilinear forms suggests that behind the strict geometry there may be a coded reference to the sensuous curves of a woman’s body.  

In the late 1960s, Sanders was on the move again. In work that has a certain affinity with the Fluxus movement, the artist began making multi-part paintings that were intended to be configured differently each time they were exhibited. In Variations, 1968, as well as other works of this time, Sanders introduces a wave-like form as if the discreet curves of his previous work have been transformed into a continuing, unending flow, whose associations range from the sine waves of electric current to the waves of the ocean. 

Dutch Bride, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 70” x 64”

Untitled (Tondo), late 1970s-early 1980s, oil on canvas, 80” diameter

In 1966, Sanders was appointed tenured professor in art and art history at SUNY New Paltz, the state university’s largest campus for the creative arts. He was to serve there until he retired in 1985. In accepting this post, Sanders seems to affirm one aspect of his European heritage — the fact that a professorship at a prestigious academy has been one of the hallmarks of success for many European artists from the nineteenth century to the post-war era, when artists ranging from Joseph Beuys to Rosemarie Trockel have held these positions.  

In Europe, a tenured professorship was intended to give the artist financial security and the creative freedom that goes with it, unencumbered by the vicissitudes of the marketplace. This was certainly true for Sanders.

God Save The Queen, 1968, acrylic on canvas, six panels, installation variable v2 panel 1, 14” x 14”; panel 2, 14” x 20”; panel 3, 14” x 16”; panel 4, 14” x 36”; panel 5, 20” x 36”; panel 6, 36” x36”.

Then, during the 1970s, Sanders returned to his previous vocabulary of curves and circles. Yet his work became increasingly more painterly, his compositions and space more complex, and the mood of the paintings more haunting and mysterious. He also felt free to experiment with a wide range of stylistic idioms. He painted occasional figure paintings and even a wonderful portrait in the style of Vuillard. His paintings ranged from works filled with swirling forms created by dense cross-hatched brushstrokes to serene canvases with flat color that seem to nod to the 1940s paintings of John Graham and Arshile Gorky. He has seized the freedom to rummage through the history of twentieth-century painting, incorporating fragments into his own vision with his characteristic virtuosity. 

Sanders’ paintings during the 1980s and 1990s become ever more poetic with overtones of the mystical. His last large-scale work, Danaë, 1989-1999, shown in the exhibition, epitomizes the personal vision of Sanders’ later years. It is a painterly cathedral, rendered in complimentary yellow-oranges and purple-blues. The space is dense and utterly ambiguous. Are we in a dense forest or a cubist maze? Is it an earthly or heavenly realm? Danaë is a complex painting that is the product of a lifetime of unceasing creative exploration.   

Catalogue will be available on Amazon and through the Foundation.

Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

87 Eldridge Street

New York, NY 10002

March 7 – July 19, 2025

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