Joop Sanders (October 6, 1921 – July 6, 2023) was a Dutch-American painter, educator, and founding member of the American Abstract Expressionist group.

[7] By the mid-1940s, Elaine de Kooning had painted approximately a dozen portraits of Sanders, which seem to express loneliness and androgyny.

During the late 1960s, Sanders created sectional paintings which would be arranged in a variety of configurations by the owner or even construed as three-dimensional sculpture.

[14] Sanders' "Gong, 1979", places the power of abstract-expressionist color and painterliness within a more formal and refined structure.

The New York Times critic Joseph Masheck in reviewing the Kren show stated:"It is nice to see somebody stick to his guns and have the world catch up.

Joop (pronounced Yope) Sanders came to New York from Amsterdam in 1939 as a teen-ager; 10 years later, he was the youngest founding member of The Club, of those most radical painters of the day, the Abstract Expressionists.

Then, in another room, are works of the present, some on paper startlingly like paintings by that compatriot of Sanders', Willem de Kooning.

Toughly sensitive and in more than one sense reviving are some small recent drawings and watercolors: in these the Orientalizing calligraphies of artists and poets and others who refused to buy into the American 50's are renewed with winning finesse and timely conviction by an individualist still unspoiled.