Irving Sandler, Art Historian Who Was Close to Artists, Dies at 92

Irving Sandler, an art critic who drew on his extensive relationships with living artists to compile authoritative histories of Abstract Expressionism and the artistic movements that followed, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Lucy Freeman Sandler, said. He had been in hospice care, she said.

Mr. Sandler was pursuing a doctorate in American history at Columbia University in 1952 when, wandering through the Museum of Modern Art one day, he came across “Chief,” an abstract painting by Franz Kline. The painting, a dynamic concatenation of thick black curves and slashes, gripped him with savage intensity.

“It was the first work of art that I really saw, and it changed my life, something like Saul jumping into Paul, as Elaine de Kooning wrote of Kline’s own leap from figuration to abstraction,” Mr. Sandler recalled in “A Sweeper-Up After Artists,” his 2003 memoir. “My conversion was less dramatic, of course, but my life would never be the same. Or, put another way, ‘Chief’ began my life-in-art, the life that has really counted for me.”

Mr. Sandler began haunting the galleries along East 10th Street, the hub of avant-garde activity in the 1950s and ′60s, and spending evenings at the Cedar Tavern, once the unofficial headquarters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He came to know the principal figures in the art world of the time and eventually spent long hours interviewing them in their studios, getting them to think out loud about their work.