With this publication, the concerns of the Russian constuctivist and suprematist movements of the 1910s and 1920s, such as the reduction of artworks to their essential structure and use of factory production techniques, became more widely understood – and clearly inspired minimalist sculptors. In 1962 the first English-language book about the Russian avant-garde, Camilla Gray’s The Great Experiment in Art: 1863-1922, was published. The sculpture is carefully arranged to emphasise and reveal the architecture of the gallery, often being presented on walls, in corners, or directly onto the floor, encouraging the viewer to be conscious of the space Minimalism and early abstractionĪlthough radical, and rejecting many of the concerns of the immediately preceding abstract expressionist movement, earlier abstract movements were an important influence on the ideas and techniques of minimalism. Minimalist art directly engages with the space it occupies. Space-aware: Carl Andre said 'I'm not a studio artist, I'm a location artist'. © Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2022 Read the image captions of the artworks below to find out about some of the key qualities of minimalist art: It can also be seen as representing such qualities as truth (because it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is), order, simplicity and harmony. Both movements challenged the existing structures for making, disseminating and viewing art and argued that the importance given to the art object is misplaced and leads to a rigid and elitist art world which only the privileged few can afford to enjoy Qualities of minimalist artĪesthetically, minimalist art offers a highly purified form of beauty. The development of minimalism is linked to that of conceptual art (which also flourished in the 1960s and 1970s). It flourished in the 1960s and 1970s with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Morris becoming the movement’s most important innovators. Minimalism emerged in the late 1950s when artists such as Frank Stella, whose Black Paintings were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959, began to turn away from the gestural art of the previous generation. Minimalist painter Frank Stella famously said about his paintings ‘What you see is what you see’. The medium, (or material) from which it is made, and the form of the work is the reality. With minimalism, no attempt is made to represent an outside reality, the artist wants the viewer to respond only to what is in front of them. We usually think of art as representing an aspect of the real world (a landscape, a person, or even a tin of soup!) or reflecting an experience such as an emotion or feeling. Minimalism or minimalist art can be seen as extending the abstract idea that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of some other thing.
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