"A tale told with humor, passion and grace."--"Art in America" Frank O'Hara called him, in a memorable poem, "the balayeur des aristes," 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. In the early 1950s, Irving Sandler, then a graduate student in American history, was awestruck by his first sight of Franz Kline's painting "Chief" at MoMA. Graduate school gave way to being "New York schooled." We see abstract expressionism give way to the new approach of Rauschenberg and Johns, and see that in turn succeeded by the pop and minimalist artists of the 1960s-- Warhol and Lichtenstein, Stella and Judd. At every turn, there was Irving Sandler, intimately conversant with the art and the artists. 34 illustrations.