What is Minimalism, the 1960s art movement?

Abstraction and Early Modern Art

While the exact date of the first abstract painting has been debated, the general art-historical consensus is that it was produced between 1910 and 1913 and that either Wassily Kandinsky or František Kupka was responsible. However, the Guggenheim’s 2017 survey of the previously little-known Swedish artist Hilma af Klint shook up the conventional wisdom, as her compositions were clearly nonobjective and dated back to 1906—a year before Picasso completed the still figurative Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Af Klint aside, much of early abstraction emanated from Cubism, and it wasn’t long before painters like Kandinsky distilled its geometric elements into a new painting syntax. Other artists—Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko—went even further in using geometry to take a highly reductive approach to composition.

Mondrian and De Stijl

Along with Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld, Mondrian cofounded Holland’s De Stijl, an art, architecture, and design movement that pursued expression through abstract, geometrical forms and pure color (which is to say colors unrelated to naturalism). He became its most prominent name through a deconstruction of painting that produced some of modernism’s most iconic works.

Initially influenced by Seurat and Cézanne and later by Picasso, Mondrian turned toward abstraction in 1914. His paintings became increasingly simplified over the next several years, and in 1921 he created the first of his signature “neo-plastic” works: blocks of primary colors contained within syncopated patterns of intersecting black lines. His aim was to uncover the numinous essence of art, which, as he put it, required “as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.”

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism

Metaphysics also impelled Kazimir Malevich, who was already an established painter in the Russian avant-garde when, in 1915, he embraced a type of abstraction that expressed “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling.” He named it Suprematism. As with Mondrian, pure, geometric shapes and limited palettes were key to Malevich’s vision, which proved to be even more fundamentalist than Mondrian’s.

In 1915 he painted Black Square, which was that just that: a black square centered on a white canvas that was also square. Black Square did retain some representational overtones, however: When Malevich debuted it in a group exhibition in St. Petersburg during the winter of 1915–16, he installed the painting in a corner by the ceiling, the hallowed spot where religious Russians hang icons in their homes, thereby linking it to Russian Orthodox rituals.

The Bauhaus

Founded in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius is 1919, the Bauhaus was a school for art, architecture, and design that merged the fine and applied arts into an interdisciplinary curriculum emphasizing a form-equals-function aesthetic.

This gospel became disseminated outside the Bauhaus largely through architecture, especially the work of Gropius and another architect and director of the school, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was Van der Rohe who coined the phrase “less is more,” to describe the philosophy behind projects like his signature Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York, an idea that would later inform Minimalism.

Alexander Rodchenko and Constructivism

Along with Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Liubov Popova, Rodchenko was a major figure within Constructivism, another segment of the Russian avant-garde whose architectonic approach to design and sculpture provided an important template for Minimalism.

In addition to sculpture, photos, and posters, Rodchenko in 1921 created Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color, a trio of monochromes that matched Black Square in radicality. As in Malevich’s case, Rodchenko’s titles spelled out their intention: a complete renunciation of content not unlike Judd’s. “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and . . . affirmed: it’s all over,” he wrote. “Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.”

Constructivism filtered into other parts of Europe, including Poland, where Katarzyna Kobro created sculptures that startingly anticipated aspects of Minimalism. Rediscovered late in the last century, Kobro’s works, today exist largely as reconstructions based on photographs, comprised rectangular planes fastened into structures opened to space. These elements were often painted in an array of bright, flat colors, evincing an interest in evenly finished surfaces that would similarly occupy artists like Judd.

American Abstract Artists

Although many of the concepts underlying Minimalism were transmitted via Europe, the groundwork for both it and Abstract Expressionism in New York was laid during the interwar period by a somewhat forgotten group: the American Abstract Artists, or AAA. Founded in 1936 to promote abstraction at a time when little of it was seen in the United States, its membership included geometric abstractionists, among them two followers of Mondrian, Burgoyne Diller and Ilya Bolotowsky. Unusual for its time, AAA also admitted many women, such as Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Alice Trumbull Mason, and Mercedes Matter.

Josef Albers, however, was its most famous member. Born in Germany, he taught at the Bauhaus and later at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at Yale. He was also the first living artist to receive solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His reputation rests on a series of paintings and prints begun in 1949 titled “Homage to the Square.” In each he nested different sizes and hues of the titular shape to investigate his theories on color.

Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism

Abstract Expressionism was everything Minimalism was not: theatrical, passionate, and heavily subjective. Yet two figures associated with the former—Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt—foreshadowed the latter by creating monochromatic compositions whose scale exceeded all previous attempts.

Newman’s most famous canvas, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), measured nearly 8 by 18 feet and featured a bright red field divided by vertical bands that Newman labeled “zips.” Like Mondrian and Malevich, Newman believed in the spiritual power of abstract art and wanted viewers to get close to the painting so that they were overwhelmed by the presence of color.

The work of Reinhardt, on the other hand was closer to the Minimalist credo. The goal of abstract art, he wrote, “is to present art-as-art and as nothing else . . . . making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive—non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.” There were no clearer indications of this than his series of “black” or “ultimate” canvases, which he claimed were the last anyone could paint. Appearances to the contrary, these works were not pure monochromes: They were divided into black squares subtly differentiated by underlying colors that resolved into faint impressions of the Swiss cross.

Prelude to Minimalism

Newman and Reinhardt, though, were just two of the names engaged in what could be called proto-Minimalism. Another was Ellsworth Kelly, whose hard-edged geometric compositions dated back to the start of the 1950s. Kelly’s sensibility was intuitive and based on his eye for color, form, and the way both related to architectural interiors. Although best known for shaped canvases begun in 1970, his interest in “the freedom of colors in space” is evident from his earliest works, such as his brightly hued checkerboard, Colors for a Large Wall (1951).

Similarly, Robert Rauschenberg— while still at Black Mountain College, where he was a student of Albers—produced a series of stark, multi-panel monochromes, one in white and the other in black. Rauschenberg himself explained that he wanted “to see how much you could pull away from an image and still have an image.”

Robert Ryman used short, overlapping gestural marks to create tactile monochromes that played with the relationship between the canvas as a minimal object and the paint applied to it. Although he became known for working in white, his initial efforts in the mid 1950s used colors like orange.

Born in Canada, Agnes Martin limned finely rendered grids in graphite washed with lambent colors. But while Martin has often been described as a kind of Minimalist mystic, she considered herself to be an Abstract Expressionist. Indeed, like Newman and like Mark Rothko, whom she greatly admired, Martin infused her work with a sense of ineffability.

Another artist prefiguring Minimalism was Yayoi Kusama. Now one of the best-known and most popular artists in the world, Kusama was an obscure figure when she arrived in New York from her native Japan in 1957. From the outset, her compositions were covered in fields of netlike patterns painted against contrasting backgrounds.

Frank Stella famously said, “What you see is what see” about his own work. The phrase could just as easily describe Minimalism. In 1959 at the tender age 23, he undertook a series of canvases in which bands of black enamel radiated concentrically from the center. This had the effect of pushing the eye out to the edges of the painting and beyond to reinforce its concreteness as an object on the wall.

Several artists identified with the nation’s capital also experimented with sharply delineated geometrical elements that included chevrons, stripes, and roundels as part of a highly chromatic strategy. Together they were called the Washington Color School, and though lyrical abstractionists like Morris Louis were members, it also included a cohort of hard-edged painters such as Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, and Sam Gilliam before he adopted his more familiar draped canvases later in his career.

Proto-minimalism in Europe

Donald Judd

During the decade following World War II, Abstract Expressionism dominated the New York art world, but by the mid 1950s artists had begun to confront its hegemony. The trend accelerated at the start of the ’60s with the arrival of Pop Art and Minimalism, both of which challenged AbEx gestural dramatics with a cool, detached aesthetic. So began the era of what could be called capital-M Minimalism and the individuals associated with it, including Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, among many others.

Donald Judd, an art critic as well as an artist, became synonymous with Minimalism because his writings promulgated the movement’s core tenets while his work distilled them into a form—the box—that became immediately recognizable as his personal trope. Judd’s boxes proved to be highly elastic: They could be mounted on the wall or floor; closed or open on the top or sides; left empty or divided into interior compartments; presented singly or in multiple iterations; scaled from small to monumental; and constructed from a wide range of materials used alone or in combination, including plywood, concrete, galvanized steel, copper, and Plexiglas. Judd used the latter in varying hues, along with transparent or opaque lacquer, to introduce vivid color schemes into many of his pieces.

Judd was also a furniture designer and self-taught architect, and in those capacities he produced two of his grandest projects: the transformation of his Soho loft building into a palace of asceticism that became a prototype for today’s luxury living; and his appropriation of an entire town in Texas—Marfa—which he remade into a site-specific showcase for his sensibility, including works by other artists who chimed with it.

Dan Flavin

Although Minimalism’s aims were objective, Dan Flavin took a more liminal approach, fusing the ephemeral and the concrete through fluorescent light fixtures of the kind common to offices and warehouses. These were usually long and straight and could be cobbled together much like wooden two-by-fours. Flavin arranged them into frames, grids, and other configurations, hanging them on walls, pushing them into corners, or using them to divide rooms. Most important, he used colored bulbs to create chromatic effects done in light instead of paint.

Flavin chafed at the Minimalist label and considered his work to be part of the light-filled landscape tradition of 19th-century Hudson River School painters such as Frederic Church and John Kensett. While this sounds somewhat implausible, Flavin arguably pursued something like a midcentury version of the Romantic sublime though overpowering displays of artificial light.

Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt produced open, skeletal cubes made initially with wooden beams before turning to fabricated steel. These were painted white and built according to a standardized ratio between the size of the girders and the space separating them and were often massed together in mathematical progressions.

LeWitt also made diagrammatic murals that initially consisted of grids and patterns of intersecting diagonal lines rendered in graphite. Over time they became more colorful and less rectilinear, as cursive shapes were introduced along with hints of illusionistic depth. But they were all executed by other people following the artist’s instructions.

Since LeWitt alluded to objects (murals) and idea (their formulation) being separate things, his projects were also Conceptualist, pointing to a general problem with categorization, since Conceptual Art and other aspects of postminimalism (Process Art, Performance) sprang up simultaneously with Minimalism itself. The work of Eva Hesse and Richard Serra likewise fit into both genres. Hesse’s practice, for instance, traded in Minimalist conceits such as serially arranged, boxlike objects, but these were made with malleable materials, like latex and fiberglass, that undermined Minimalism’s rigor. Serra’s sculpture hewed toward rigidity, but he used pliable sheets of lead and slabs of raw forged steel, which contrasted with Minimalism’s slick production values.

Minimalism and Painting

While sculpture played an outsize role within Minimalism, the movement produced its fair share of painters, including Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, and Jo Baer. However, given the qualities of the medium and its association with the artist’s hand, Minimalist painting was less programmatic than its sculptural analog.

Marden surfaced in the mid 1960s by adopting Jasper Johns’s use of encaustic pigment for large, expansive monochromes, single-colored panels that would sometimes be joined together to form diptychs and triptychs.

Striking a balance between curvilinear and rectilinear forms, Mangold’s works consisted of shaped monochrome canvases inscribed with lines that created visual tensions between their borders and interiors. Mangold’s paintings also made references to Greco-Roman and Old Master art.

In keeping with the idea of a painting being first and foremost a physical object, Jo Baer applied bands of color along the edges of otherwise white canvases, creating the appearance of a frame around a void.

Minimalism’s Spread

Though Minimalism proper was codified in 1960s New York, it wasn’t confined there for long before disseminating and evolving elsewhere.

In Los Angeles, the preponderance of auto-body shops, plastic supply houses attached to the local aerospace industry, and the all-encompassing Southern California light influenced the “Finish Fetish” and “Light and Space” schools of contemporary Californian art. Works like John McCracken’s glossy painted planks; DeWain Valentine’s translucent, cast-resin lozenges; James Turrell’s fugitive installations of lighting and scrim; and Mary Corse’s precise geometric compositions formulated with glass microspheres mixed into paint all spoke to a phenomenological approach to Minimalism that was uniquely Left Coast.

In postwar Germany, Gerhard Richter, whose practice encompasses a plethora of styles that makes no distinction between representation and abstraction, forayed into Minimalism with plates of glass reverse-painted in gray, and compositions based on paint-store color charts. Two other German painters related to Minimalism were Blinky Palermo (born Peter Schwarze) and Imi Knoebel. Both worked in variety of formats and materials while exploring the nexus of color, configuration, and gallery space—Palermo with murals, “soft” abstractions made from colored fabrics, and paintings on aluminum panel; Knoebel with paintings on pieces of shaped plywood that were hung conventionally or stacked against the wall or on the floor.

Minimalism’s Legacy

Just as the seeds of Minimalism were planted over the 20th century’s first half, Minimalism itself continued to reverberate over its second—referenced, for instance, by artists connected to the 1980s Commodity Fetish or Neo-Geo movements, such as Peter Halley and Haim Steinbach. Another name from the same period, Allan McCollum, unpacked Minimalism’s use of serial objects with installations featuring hundreds of cast-plaster “Surrogates” resembling assembly-line versions of Malevich’s Black Square.

During the 1990s, certain artists— Mona Hatoum, Felix Gonzales Torres, and Doris Salcedo, among them—joined Minimalist strategies to identity politics, weighing in on matters related to multiculturalism, gender and sexual preference. Gonzales Torres work touched on AIDS, as did the artists associated with the AIDS activist group, ACT UP, whose posters and pamphlets reflected the impact of Minimalism on graphic art.

During the 21st century, Minimalism’s influence resulted in something of a mixed bag. Artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Liz Deschenes introduced Minimalist aesthetics into photography, for example. However, the 2010s saw the brief rise and immediate fall of a neo-Minimalist revival that emphasized visual appeal. Derided by critics as “zombie formalism,” this market-driven epiphenomenon—which rapidly inflated and then deflated the auction values of then-emerging artists such as Jacob Kassay and Ryan Sullivan—is remembered largely as an object lesson in the toxic effects of too much money chasing art.

Still, Minimalism remains widespread if for no other reason than its transformation into an aesthetic mind-set. With respect to seizing the public imagination, then, Minimalism’s impact has been nothing short of maximal.