Reviews

New York Times Sunday April 23, 1939. p.10x

with illustration of Uganda Elephants (Kleemans)

"Sanford Ross has gone to the dark continent for his subject matter without going exotic on us. He can and occasionally does use high color but prefers and is perhaps best in a subdued range with firm but not tight patterning. From such more decorative papers as the beautifully stated Thorn Bush Trees he proceeds to more moody expressions as in Kenya Lions in which a sinister sky reinforces the savage spirit of the animal group in the foreground. In Elephants in Uganda and Black Rhino he gives us large simple patterns and in Saturnalia and especially convincing worked-out design. Ross's work is delightful."

The New Yorker 1933, by Louis Mumford

"Sanford Ross's watercolors are in the modern wing of the Macbeth galleries belongs to the school Birchfield and Hopper, but he is something more than a gleaner after the harvest. His best pictures, in fact, are those like "Matawan, New Jersey" and "Shrewsbury Church" and "Empty House" in which he has got farthest away from his original models with his decisive draftsmanship, his color, and his more direct feeling. Mr. Ross seems to me to have the potentiality pushing beyond the obvious impediments of the Brown Decades and also beyond mere sentimentality and mere factual statement -- the two bogs in which Birchfield and Hopper have tended, respectively, to get stuck."

Time Magazine April 2, 1934 (with photo of S.R.)

Highwayman

Critics who the deplore the lack of US native art had no reason this week to complain of the work of Sanford Ross who at 27 was holding his third one-man show in Manhattans swank Reinhardt galleries. Born in Orange New Jersey, artist Ross by preference paints the jigsaw tortured mansions which solid New Jersey citizens built and lived in three lived in during the last lush years of the 19th century. Besides the New Jersey pictures artist Ross last week showed a series of swift state highways, a snarling pile of junk, several melancholy landscapes, the picture of The Rocks, Mrs. Henry Clews Newport residence. Sanford Ross lives in a Manhattan apartment, summers in Rumson, New Jersey. He studied under George Luks and Thomas Benton, shows little of their influence. Sensitive to such Americana as gas stations, oil tanks, railroad crossings, artist Ross is represented in the Addison Gallery in Andover Massachusetts and New Jersey's Newark Museum.

New York Sun March 31, 1934 by Henry McBride, the

Sanford Ross in his current showing of watercolors at the Reinhardt Galleries appears to be forsaking his New Jersey suburbiana to some extent for there are fewer of those marbles of false front structures in village street, less jigsaw trimmings and other architectural excrescences so familiar in his previous work.

Mr. Ross is not going to let us off easily. If he removes horrible examples of domestic architecture, he presents landscape mostly as flat monotony cut by a gleaming surfaced highway flanked by white posts. Occasionally there are gaunt cliffs or some telephone poles in bleak procession to change from one type of dismal scene to another. Not that the artist is not veracious. Only too well do most of us know these horrible state highways shorn of every vestige of natural beauty that's seem some way in the course of their construction to have eradicated every trace of interest in the adjacent landscape. Yet occasionally Mr. Ross relents. He gives us an entrancing vista of the rich rolling country of Pennsylvania. In "Lancaster" he invests "Willow Trees" their pollarded tops fringed with green with a lyric "Pine Belt" or "Connecticut Snows" or "Connecticut Barns" mark other instances of his overstepping the boundaries of fidelity of record to imbue his work with an emotional content. The artist has gained appreciably in his technical power. His crisp handling, increased surety of design and more interesting use of color give vitality to the large showing. He uses watercolor somewhat like oil pigment in applying one coat upon another till a ricness of opaque surfaces is obtained.

New York Post, March 31, 1934 by Margaret Breuning

Sanford Ross, now exhibiting in the Reinhardt Galleries, belongs to the dynamic American School. Whatever else may be said about his watercolors, they may not be said to lack force. In addition to being emphatic, the artist makes clear statements so that his pictures strike the eye at any distance. Then, too, he has the ability to make unlikely subjects such as junkpile and trestle railway bridges serve his artistic needs. In many instances he gets away with these ideas successfully.

For instance I have always had the feeling that modern concrete roadways admirable as they are for motoring are death to the pictorial aspects of the countryside they bisect, but Mr. Ross has one picture called "Lancaster" which shows a concrete highway spinning across the continent and he actually makes it plausibly artistic with pattern and distance and air and everything. He also has filling stations and lunch wagons and practical barn buildings that would have filled Dante Gabriel Rossetti's soul with horror but which did not fill Mr. Ross's soul with horror. Mr. Ross apparently likes America now and just as it is. He doesn't make fun of the lunch wagons etc. He paints them seriously and as nicely as he can and does often achieve regular Courier & Ives effects.

Sanford Ross, now exhibiting in the Reinhardt Galleries, belongs to the dynamic American School. Whatever else may be said about his watercolors, they may not be said to lack force. In addition to being emphatic, the artist makes clear statements so that his pictures strike the eye at any distance. Then, too, he has the ability to make unlikely subjects such as junkpile and trestle railway bridges serve his artistic needs. In many instances he gets away with these ideas successfully.

For instance I have always had the feeling that modern concrete roadways admirable as they are for motoring are death to the pictorial aspects of the countryside they bisect, but Mr. Ross has one picture called "Lancaster" which shows a concrete highway spinning across the continent and he actually makes it plausibly artistic with pattern and distance and air and everything. He also has filling stations and lunch wagons and practical barn buildings that would have filled Dante Gabriel Rossetti's soul with horror but which did not fill Mr. Ross's soul with horror. Mr. Ross apparently likes America now and just as it is. He doesn't make fun of the lunch wagons etc. He paints them seriously and as nicely as he can and does often achieve regular Courier & Ives effects.