Minimal art

Minimal art. A type of abstract art, particularly sculpture, characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a deliberate lack of expressive content; it emerged as a trend in the late 1950s and flourished particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. (The term was evidently first used in print by the British philosopher Richard Wollheim in an article entitled ‘Minimal Art’ in Arts Magazine in January 1965, although the American writer Barbara Rose is sometimes credited with coining it; the term ‘Minimalism’ had been used by David Burliuk as early as 1929, but with a vaguer meaning, referring to ‘the minimum of operating means’ in John Graham's paintings.) There are numerous precedents for the stark simplicity of Minimal art. In 1777, for example, the poet Goethe designed an Altar of Good Fortune for his garden in Weimar consisting of two utterly pure geometrical stone shapes—a sphere surmounting a cube; and in 1883 the journalist Alphonse Allais (1855–1905) created a burlesque version of minimalism when he exhibited in Paris a plain sheet of white paper with the title First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow (he also produced all-black and all-red pictures with similar comic titles: Negroes Fighting in a Cave at Night and Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Red Sea). Such byways aside, the roots of Minimal art can be traced to the stark geometric abstractions of Malevich and the ready-mades of Duchamp in the second decade of the century, and after this the idea of extreme reductivism occurred in various aspects of avant-garde art—certain sculptures of Brancusi, for example, the Spatialism of Lucio Fontana, and the monochromatic canvases of Yves Klein. As a movement, however, Minimal art developed mainly in the USA rather than Europe and its impersonality is seen as a reaction against the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism. Leading sculptors of the movement include Carl Andre, Don Judd, and Tony Smith; leading painters (for whom the immediate precedents were Albers and Reinhardt) include Frank Stella (in his early work), and Hard-Edge abstractionists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland.

According to The Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion (1979), ‘The theory of minimalism is that without the diverting presence of “composition”, and by the use of plain, often industrial materials arranged in geometrical or highly simplified configurations we may experience all the more strongly the pure qualities of colour, form, space and materials'. Minimal art has close links with Conceptual art (Minimalist sculpture often has a strong element of theoretical demonstration about it, with the artist leaving the fabrication of the design to industrial specialists), and there are sometimes affinities with other contemporaneous movements such as Land art. There is even a kinship with Pop art in a shared preference for slick, impersonal surfaces (some Minimal artists, however, have used ‘natural’ products such as logs rather than machine-finished products). Like Pop art, Minimal art proved a commercial success for many of its leading practitioners, and it generated a huge amount of critical commentary; sometimes it seemed that the less there was to see in a work, the more verbiage it attracted. See also PRIMARY STRUCTURES.