For over fifty years Irving Sandler has been a vital presence in the New York art world. Frank O'Hara called him, in a memorable poem, "the balayeur des artistes," the sweeper-up after artists. He has been a friend or acquaintance of virtually every important American artist of the postwar period, and his art criticism and books constitute the first and most comprehensive critical and historical account of this extraordinary period. His personal chronicle is the living memory of the New York art world, from abstract expressionism to the present day.