Tenth Street in the 1950s had become a center of the cities’ burgeoning arts community. The surrounding area formed a social hub of studios and artist run cooperative galleries where Abstract Expressionism ruled the day. The critic and curator Irving Sandler was a key figure as a critic and friend to many artists as well as an employee of the influential Tanager gallery. Sandler was also an active presence at the famous Artists Club. Although known for his early championing of the Abstract Expressionists, he befriended a younger generation of artists that reacted against the rhetoric of gestural abstraction, the leading style of Tenth Street. Chief among Sandler’s core were Ronald Bladen, Mark di Suvero, Lois Dodd, Al Held, Alex Katz, Alice Neel, Philip Pearlstein and George Sugarman.