Minimalism Art Movement - Art Appreciation A brief overview of the art movement that took place in New York, early 1960s. This movement is apparently a blatant rejection of abstract expressionism.

1. M I N I M A L I S M
1960

2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were
self-consciously renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and
academic. A wave of new influences and rediscovered styles led younger artists to
question conventional boundaries between various media. The new art favored the
cool over the "dramatic": their sculptures were frequently fabricated from industrial
materials and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract
Expressionism. Painters and sculptors avoided overt symbolism and emotional
content, but instead called attention to the materiality of the works. By the end of
the 1970s, Minimalism had triumphed in America and Europe through a
combination of forces including museum curators, art dealers, and publications,
plus new systems of private and government patronage. And members of a new
movement, Post-Minimalism, were already challenging its authority and were thus
a testament to how important Minimalism itself became.

3. FACTORS AFFECTEDTHE PERIOD
In New York City in the mid 1950s, young artists like Donald Judd, Robert
Morris, and Dan Flavin were painting in the dominant Abstract Expressionist vein
but were drifting from it toward new directions inspired by a freshened knowledge
of recent European art. Works by members of the Dutch De Stijl group, the
Russian Constructivists, and the German Bauhaus were shown in New York City
museums and galleries. All three groups had pioneered new definitions of the visual
arts by going far beyond traditional painting and sculpture.

4. ARTISTICCHARACTERISTICS
Aesthetically, minimalist art offers a highly purified form of beauty. It can
also be seen as representing such qualities as truth, order, simplicity and harmony.
Minimalist Artworks:
• have no suggestions o biography from artists, or metaphors of any kind
• resembled factory-built commodities and upended traditional definitions of art
whose meaning was tied to a narrative or to the artist.
• demanded physical as well as visual response from the viewers
Further, it is totally abstract with very few forms. It is also sometimes
associated with Gestalt Psychology.

5. ARTISTS
M I N I M A L I S M

6. SOL LEWITT
Sol LeWitt earned a place in the history of art for his
leading role in the Conceptual movement. His belief in the
artist as a generator of ideas was instrumental in the
transition from the modern to the postmodern era.
Conceptual art, expounded by LeWitt as an intellectual,
pragmatic act, added a new dimension to the artist's role that
was distinctly separate from the romantic nature of Abstract
Expressionism. LeWitt believed the idea itself could be the
work of art, and maintained that, like an architect who creates
a blueprint for a building and then turns the project over to a
construction crew, an artist should be able to conceive of a
work and then either delegate its actual production to others
or perhaps even never make it at all. LeWitt's work ranged
from sculpture, painting, and drawing to almost exclusively
conceptual pieces that existed only as ideas or elements of
the artistic process itself.

7. DONALD JUDD
Donald Judd was an American artist, whose rejection
of both traditional painting and sculpture led him to a
conception of art built upon the idea of the object as it exists
in the environment. Judd's works belong to
the Minimalist movement, whose goal was to rid art of
the Abstract Expressionists' reliance on the self-referential
trace of the painter in order to form pieces that were free
from emotion. To accomplish this task, artists such as Judd
created works comprising of single or repeated geometric
forms produced from industrialized, machine-made materials
that eschewed the artist's touch. Judd's geometric and
modular creations have often been criticized for a seeming
lack of content; it is this simplicity, however, that calls into
question the nature of art and that posits Minimalist sculpture
as an object of contemplation, one whose literal and insistent
presence informs the process of beholding.

8. ROBERT MORRIS
Robert Morris was one of the central figures
of Minimalism. Through both his own sculptures of the 1960s
and theoretical writings, Morris set forth a vision of art pared
down to simple geometric shapes stripped of metaphorical
associations, and focused on the artwork's interaction with
the viewer. However, in contrast to fellow Minimalists Donald
Judd and Carl Andre, Morris had a strikingly diverse range that
extended well beyond the Minimalist ethos and was at the
forefront of other contemporary American art movements as
well, most notably, Process art and Land art. Through both his
artwork and his critical writings, Morris explored new notions
of chance, temporality, and ephemerality.
Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience."

9. DAN FLAVINFew artists can boast having explored a single medium, and an
unusual one at that, as tenaciously and consistently as Dan Flavin with
his signature fluorescent light tubes. Classified within
the Minimalist framework, Flavin saw himself as vehemently
"Maximalist." That is, in using readymade objects in the style
of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, he exploited the possibilities of the most
banal and in some ways ugly material: harsh fluorescent lights - surely
the stuff of futuristic anti-aestheticism. Flavin began incorporating
electric lights into his works in the early 1960s with his
breakthrough Icons series. Having hit upon his chosen medium, he
abandoned painting altogether, focusing on light works for the
remainder of his career, where he produced installations and sculptural
pieces made exclusively of fluorescent light fixtures and tubes that came
in a limited range of colors and sizes. Working with prefabricated rather
than hand-crafted materials allowed Flavin to focus on the light itself
and the way in which it transformed ("sculpted") the exhibition space. A
clear progression in scale and ambition marks Flavin's site-specific light
installations, sculptural and architectural environments commissioned
by a wide-range of artistic and religious institutions for the rest of his
career.

10. FRANK STELLA
Frank Stella, an iconic figure of postwar American art, is
considered the most influential painter of a generation that
moved beyond Abstract Expressionism toward Minimalism. In his
early work, Stella attempted to drain any external meaning or
symbolism from painting, reducing his images to geometric form
and eliminating illusionistic effects. His goal was to make
paintings in which pictorial force came from materiality, not from
symbolic meaning. He famously quipped, “What you see is what
you see,” a statement that became the unofficial credo of
Minimalist practice. In the 1980s and '90s, Stella turned away
from Minimalism, adopting a more additive approach for a series
of twisting, monumental, polychromatic metal wall reliefs and
sculptures based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

11. CARL ANDRE
During the 1960s and 1970s, Carl Andre produced a
number of sculptures which are now counted among the most
innovative of his generation. Along with figures such
as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse and Robert
Morris, Andre played a central role in defining the nature
of Minimalist Art. His most significant contribution was to
distance sculpture from processes of carving, modeling, or
constructing, and to make works that simply involved sorting
and placing. Before him, few had imagined that sculpture
could consist of ordinary, factory-finished raw materials,
arranged into straightforward configurations and set directly
on the ground. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s many of his
low-lying, segmented works came to redefine for a new
generation of artists the very nature of sculpture itself.

12. RICHARD SERRA
Richard Serra is one of the preeminent American
artists and sculptors of the post-Abstract
Expressionist period. Beginning in the late 1960s to the
present, his work has played a major role in advancing
the tradition of modern abstract sculpture in the
aftermath of Minimalism. His work draws new,
widespread attention to sculpture's potential for
experience by viewers in both physical and visual terms,
no less often within a site-specific, if not highly public
setting.

13. MEDIUM POPULAR
The use of prefabricated industrial materials and simple, often repeated
geometric forms together with the emphasis placed on the physical space occupied
by the artwork led to some works that forced the viewer to confront the
arrangement and scale of the forms. Viewers also were led to experience qualities of
weight, height, gravity, agility or even the appearance of light as a material
presence. They were often faced with artworks that demanded a physical as well as
a visual response.

14. POPULAR ART FORMS
Minimalist art frequently takes the form of installation or sculpture, for
example with Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt. However, there
are also a number of minimalist painters, such as Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella.
• SCULPTURES
• PAINTINGS
• INSTALLATIONS

15. ARTWORKS
M I N I M A L I S M

16. Minimalist Sculpture
Most Minimalists were focused on creating three-dimensional objects, as this was the most radical and experimental facet of the
movement. The Minimalists' emphasis on eradicating signs of authorship from their art by using simple, geometric forms and industrial
materials led to works that resembled simple objects rather than traditional sculpture. The innovative placement of these works on the
floor of gallery spaces rather than on pedestals further underscored their difference from conventional works of art.
Minimalist Paintings
Aside from sculptors, Minimalism is also associated with a few key abstract painters, such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin,
and Robert Ryman. These artists painted simple canvases that were considered minimal due to their barebones, often geometric
compositions. Using only line, solid color, and sometimes geometric forms and shaped canvases, these artists combined painting
materials in such a way that questioned the traditional dichotomy between artistic media by making paintings that could also be
considered objects in their own right because of the bulkiness of the canvas support and the nontraditional shapes of the paintings.
Minimalist Light Installations
This use of florescent light tubes to create art further emphasized the Minimalist move away from traditional art forms. The standard
industrial fixtures that held the tubes were also useful as compositional elements. Turned to the viewer, their blank sides contrasted to
the outward facing colored light in the grid pieces. Younger artists Keith Sonnierand Bruce Nauman saw the potential of light in
sculpture and used neon tubing in combination with other materials and lettering.
Other Minimalists
The unadorned style and system-bound concepts of Minimalism found followers in architecture and interior design, where a revival of
the International Style of the 1920s occurred and even Art Deco received a fresh look. Contemporary choreographers eliminated fussy
costumes, and dancers performed to the strict, repetitive music by Minimalist composers on bare stages. Even, the frugal-appearing
low-calorie plates of nouvelle cuisine imported from Paris were another phenomenon of Minimalism.

17. DIE FAHNE HOCH!
Frank Stella
1959
DIMENSIONS:Object: 1600 x 3054
x 2330 mm
MEDIUM: Enamel onAluminum
LOCATION: London
GALLERY: Tate Gallery

18. TWO OPEN MODULAR CUBES/HALF-OFF
Sol LeWitt
1972
Unquestionably a key monument in modern art, this work, one of the series of Black Paintings done
by Frank Stella, is a bold counter-movement against the eminent Abstract Expressionist painters. It is
a monochrome rectangular painting on a heavy chassis projecting from the wall into surrounding
space as if urging the viewer to move back. Magnetized, the viewer is drawn closer seeking to read
the pattern of pinstripes on the surface. These stripes are in fact the raw canvas revealed between
broad black stripes painted with few visible brushstrokes. The painting is an unframed, flat
abstraction and would appear to be meaningless except for its title: Die Fahne Hoch! (Raise High the
Flag!), the opening words of the Nazi anthem. Stella has denied any political connection, and one
could possibly see the title as a wave to Jasper Johns, whose American flag paintings of 1954-55 were
met with praise by his critics, but also a general public bewilderment.
Stella challenged the traditional dichotomy between painting and sculpture that was championed by
Clement Greenberg and other modernists, particularly those associated with Abstract Expressionism.
In particular, Greenberg felt that each medium and, indeed, each art form should be pure with no
overlap with other media, an idea that is directly disputed by Stella's canvas/object and most
Minimalists.

19. TWO OPEN MODULAR
CUBES/HALF-OFF
Sol LeWitt
1972
DIMENSIONS:Object: 1600 x 3054
x 2330 mm
MEDIUM: Enamel onAluminum
LOCATION: London
GALLERY: Tate Gallery

20. TWO OPEN MODULAR CUBES/HALF-OFF
Sol LeWitt
1972
In 1982 the artist wrote, 'the most interesting characteristic of the cube is
that it is relatively uninteresting’. It is best used as a basic unit for any more elaborate
function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed.'
This sculpture is one of a group on the same scale, beginning with a single cube and
using it as a building block or module in various combinations. This is the key
example of the 'half-off' sculptures, where the cubes abut along half of one side
instead of being aligned. The series includes works with three half-off cubes and with
five half-off cubes alternately projecting and receding in a zig-zag. There are
potentially many additions to the basic form.

21. UNTITLED (L-BEAMS)
Robert Morris
1965
SIZE: 8 x 8 x 2 ft.
MEDIUM: Stainless Steel
LOCATION: NewYork
GALLERY: Whitney Museum of
American Art

22. UNTITLED (L-BEAMS)
Robert Morris
1965
One of Morris's best-known Minimalist pieces, Untitled (L-Beams) lacks any
texture, trace of the artist's hand or figural content that would otherwise distract
the viewer from pure engagement with the arranged forms. The work is composed
of three L-shaped forms identical in every way, but positioned differently - one
lying on its side, another resting on two edges, and the third standing erect. The
forms' configuration causes them to be perceived as varying in size and shape.
Morris's concern with the experiential aspect of the piece is revealed in his use of
polyhedrons - three-dimensional solids with flat faces and straight edges whose
forms and shapes could be readily grasped by the viewer. It also underpinned his
instructions that the work be arranged differently each time it was to be exhibited
so that viewers would experience the work differently as well.

23. 144 MAGNESIUM SQUARE
Carl Andre
1969
DIMENSIONS:Object: 10 x 3658 x 3658 mm
MEDIUM: Magnesium
LOCATION: London
GALLERY: Tate Gallery

24. 144 MAGNESIUM SQUARE
Carl Andre
1969
The attention to the properties and uses of industrial elements
demonstrated by 144 Magnesium Square and the rest of the series may be seen as an
aspect of Andre’s wider political outlook and commitment to Marxism, which led
him to participate in artists’ strikes and other industrial actions in the late 1960s.
Rather than shaping his materials like a traditional craftsman, Andre simply
arranged the plates, an activity not unlike the labour of a factory worker on a
production line

25. DIE
Tony Smith
1962
DIMENSIONS: 182.9 x 182.9 x
182.9 cm (72 x 72 x 72 in.) gross
weight: 500 lb.
MEDIUM: Steel with oiled finish
LOCATION: Washington, DC
GALLERY: NationalGallery of Art

26. DIE
Tony Smith
1962
The sculpture's deceptively simple title invites multiple associations: it
alludes to die casting, to one of a pair of dice, and, ultimately, to death. As Smith
remarked, "Six feet has a suggestion of being cooked. Six foot box. Six foot under."
Rationality, evoked by Die's purely geometric configuration, is countered by the
sculpture's brooding presence. Meaning becomes relative rather than absolute,
something generated through the interplay of word and object. Weaving together
strains of architecture, industrial manufacture, and the found object, Smith radically
transformed the way sculpture could look, how it could be made, and, ultimately,
how it could be understood.

27. UNTITLED
Donald Judd
1972
DIMENSIONS:Object: 916 x 1555 x
1782 mm
MEDIUM: Copper, Enamel, and
Aluminum
LOCATION: London
GALLERY: Tate Gallery

28. UNTITLED
Donald Judd
1972
By the 1970s, Judd's "specific objects," as he liked to call these box-like forms that sat directly on the floor,
had become, despite their sharp edges and flat color, more complex through his exploration of surface and
color. The exterior surface is composed of copper, an industrial material, but one whose warm and
reflective surface combines with the richness of the wooden floor as it mirrors its environment. The interior
is colored with a highly saturated, red enamel that vibrates in its intensity and contrasts with the static
nature of the form in its entirety. The red interior also contrasts with the copper, and yet deepens the
viewers' experience by encouraging them to think about the relationship between inside and outside and
by asking them to consider the effects of different surface values. Here, the sleekness of the red enamel
adds to the seductive aspect of the piece, and may suggest some of the objects, like nail polish or cars, that
we choose to purchase as consumers. Moreover, this piece is in some ways the polar opposite of the whole
anthropomorphizing tendency that viewers have when they look at sculpture -- the tendency for humans
to extend the vertical orientation of their own bodies and see human forms in sculpture, which traditionally
was vertically oriented. Instead of seeing in the work a reflection of that usual vertical orientation of the
human, organic form, here we have a piece that is more horizontal than vertical and contains inside it
empty space rather than "insides" (internal organs).

29. UNTITLED (IN HONOR
OF HAROLD JOACHIM) 3
Dan Flavin
1977
DIMENSIONS: 8 ft. (244 cm)
MEDIUM: Fluorescent Light
Fixtures andTubes
LOCATION: Bridgehampton
GALLERY: Collection of the Artists

30. UNTITLED (IN HONOR OF HAROLD JOACHIM) 3
Dan Flavin
1977
Flavin's works differ in some ways from those of other Minimalists, who shared the same interests in
prefabricated materials, transforming the traditional viewing experience, and honoring the influence of
Russian Constructivism in their use of repetitive, modular forms. In Flavin's work, however, the work of art
is not comprised of the material itself, in this case the fluorescent light fixtures and colored tubes, but is
instead the shape and color of the light emitted by the tubes. Flavin literally sculpts and defines spaces
with colored light, creating a completely new form of art that is most notable for its lack of materiality, yet
seemingly solid presence that almost appears to invade the viewer's space.
He used only prefabricated commercially available tubes in their standard sizes, thus eliminating the hand
of the artist, but he would often arrange the fixtures to create various shapes. In this example, the fixtures
are placed to form a grid, a traditional Minimalist shape because of its strict geometry and mathematical
precision. The work is dedicated to Harold Joachim, a British idealist philosopher of the early twentieth
century, who studied truth and specifically how humans arrive at their knowledge or truth claims. By
naming the work after Joachim, Flavin may be making an argument for the essential truth-value of his art
and for his art as the pared down essence of art.

31. REFERENCES
BOOKS
1) Meyer, J. (2000). Minimalism.Vol. 60;Volume 83. Phaidon Press. University of Michigan.
2) Strickland, E. (2000). Minimalism:Origins. Indiana University Press. United States
WEB
1)Encyclopædia Britannica (2017). Art Movement: Minimalism. Retrieved from:
https://www.britannica.com/art/Minimalism
2)Tate Gallery (2017). ArtTerm: Minimalism. Retrieved from: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-
terms/m/minimalism
3)The Art Story (2017). Movement, Style, andTendencies: Minimalism. Retrieved from:
http://www.theartstory.org/movement-minimalism.html