Minimal Art

Minimal Art, an art movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, chiefly in the United States. Minimalist paintings and sculptures typically consist of geometric shapes or other simple forms, often arranged in a series of modules (standard units). Other names proposed for the movement, including systemic painting, ABC art, and serial art, reflect its aims and impact.

Minimalism was conceived largely in opposition to abstract expressionism, a movement that dominated the art world of the 1950s. Abstract expressionist painters sought to express emotional experience directly through spontaneous painting methods, such as slashing brushstrokes or dripped paint, that allowed the artist’s subconscious to determine the artistic outcome. They considered the subconscious to be art’s motivating impulse and highest authority. The proponents of minimal art, on the other hand, were interested in logical systems and universal physical principles (such as mathematical progressions or gravity) rather than individual sensations and their expression. Minimalists favored the hard, straight lines of industrial design over uninhibited brushwork, and they suppressed evidence of hand craftsmanship in favor of commercial production. Above all, they were interested in the sheer physical presence of the artwork, uncomplicated by illusion or metaphor; to emphasize this point they often worked on a very large scale.

American sculptor Donald Judd, who exerted influence through his critical writing as well as through his art, established many of minimalism’s ground rules. Judd’s sculptures consist of simple geometric forms arranged in series, with identical repetition in some series and incremental alterations from one unit to the next in other series. Much of his work from the early and mid-1960s involves linear series of cubes or rectangles machined from metal and Plexiglass, many of them partly lacquered with automobile body paint. Judd’s sculptures either hung on the wall or sat directly on the floor—the elimination of pedestals was considered critical to minimalist sculpture because it allowed for a more direct confrontation between viewer and artwork.

American painter Frank Stella made a major contribution to the definition of minimalist painting with his pinstripe images, the earliest of which date to 1959. These began as chalky white stripes painted on rectangular black fields, but Stella soon introduced notches in the stripes, which were reflected in the contours of the canvas itself. These shaped canvases, their configuration determined by the logic of the paintings’ compositions, were enormously influential. They affirmed a minimalist belief that art should be created according to a logic generated within the artwork itself, not in reference to tradition or other outside influences. In one of minimalism’s most quoted epigrams, Stella said of his paintings, “What you see is what you see.”

Other important minimalists include American sculptors Sol LeWitt, best known for his three-dimensional white grids; Carl Andre, who lays metal tiles directly on the floor; and Dan Flavin, who worked with fluorescent light tubes. American painters Jo Baer and Ellsworth Kelly and sculptors Tony Smith and Robert Morris also produced influential work based on hard-edged geometric shapes.

Minimalism’s characteristic features were not without precedent. Two important predecessors are sculptor David Smith, whose work of the early 1960s was based largely on circles and squares, and Ad Reinhardt, a painter best known for all-black canvases divided into squares, although both are associated by artistic temperament and time period with the abstract expressionists. The cool, commerce-savvy approach of the Pop artists, near-contemporaries of the minimalists, was also influential. More distant in time, but closer in visual terms, are the 1918 white-on-white squares of Russian painter Kasimir Malevich and the grid-based paintings of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, first made in the 1920s. These works are unquestionably minimalist in their cleanly finished lines and their lack of narrative reference, but they grew out of an entirely different theoretical framework.

Almost as soon as minimalism gained coherence, its boundaries began to dissolve. Already in the mid-1960s, the so-called post-minimalist, or process, artists were softening minimalism’s edges with such destabilizing principles as entropy, chance, and even personal touch. By tossing, tearing, propping, strewing, and otherwise randomly bestowing such materials as lead, felt, and ball bearings, American process artists Richard Serra, Barry LeVa, and Robert Morris challenged minimalism’s formal austerity. Other sculptors, including Americans Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, took minimalist principles outdoors, reshaping the landscape to create colossal sculptures called earthworks, mainly in the American Southwest. Another alternative can be seen in the quirky modular sculptures of American artist Eva Hesse, as well as in the luminous, visibly hand-drawn grid paintings of Canadian-American artist Agnes Martin. Both women employ minimalist repetition of a basic unit but allow individual character to shine through, a quality that some have seen as distinctly feminine.

Of the early minimalists, Judd and Andre are among the few who remained faithful to its program. Others, including LeWitt and Stella, have produced work of steadily increasing individuality and complexity.