Minimalism (visual arts)
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially Visual art and
History
Minimalism in visual art, generally referred to as "minimal art", literalist art,
The European roots of minimalism are found in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.[10][11] Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of abstract expressionism that had been dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s.[12]
Paintings
In contrast to the previous decade's more subjective abstract expressionists, some minimalists explicitly stated that their art was not about self-expression, theirs was 'objective'. In general, minimalism's features included geometric, often cubic forms purged of much metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.
One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter Frank Stella, whose early "pinstripe" paintings were included in the 1959 show,
Monochrome revival
Monochrome painting had been initiated at the first Incoherent arts' exhibition in 1882 in Paris, with a black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud entitled Combat de Nègres dans un tunnel (Negroes fight in a tunnel). In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writer Alphonse Allais proposed seven other monochrome paintings, such as Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige (First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow, white), or Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge (Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea, red). However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th century Dada, or Neo-Dada, and particularly the works of the Fluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich.
Ad Reinhardt, whose reductive nearly all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, wrote of the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."[16]
Reinhardt's remark directly contradicts Hans Hofmann's regard for nature as the source of his own abstract expressionist paintings. A famous exchange in 1942 between Hofmann and Jackson Pollock was recorded by Lee Krasner in an interview with Dorothy Strickler (on 1964-11-02) for the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.[17] In Krasner's words:
When I brought Hofmann up to meet Pollock and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann's reaction was—one of the questions he asked Jackson was, "Do you work from nature?" There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson's answer was, "I am nature." And Hofmann's reply was, "Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself." To which Jackson did not reply at all.
Specific objects
The tendency in minimal art to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic, and fictive in favor of the literal led to a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Earl Ortman,[18] who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These specific objects inhabited a space not comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoid easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.[citation needed]
Criticism
This movement was heavily criticised by modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some critics thought minimal art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s.
The most notable critique of minimalism was produced by
Fried's essay was immediately challenged by
Another critique of minimal art concerns a fact that many artists were only designers of the projects while the actual art works were executed by unknown craftsmen.[19]
See also
References
- ^ Dempsey, Amy. Styles, Schools and Movements, Thames & Hudson, 2002. "The artists themselves did not like the label because of the negative implication that their work was simplistic and devoid of 'art content'."
- ^ Fried, M. "Art and Objecthood", Artforum, 1967
- ^ Rose, Barbara. "ABC Art", Art in America 53, no. 5 (October–November 1965): 57–69.
- ISBN 978-3864421099.
- ^ Time, June 3, 1966, "Engineer's Esthetic", p. 64
- ^ Newsweek, May 16, 1966, "The New Druids", p. 104
- ^ Systemic Painting, Guggenheim Museum
- ^ Systemic art, Oxford-Art encyclopedia
- ^ Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, Google books online
- ^ Maureen Mullarkey, Art Critical, "Giorgio Morandi"
- ^ Daniel Marzona, Uta Grosenick; Minimal art, p. 12
- ^ Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: a critical anthology, pp. 161–172
- ^ "Minimalism | art movement | Britannica".
- ISBN 3-8228-8950-4.
- ^ "Restoring the Immaterial: Study and Treatment of Yves Klein's Blue Monochrome (IKB42)". Modern Paint Uncovered.
- ISBN 978-0-520-07670-9.
- ^ Lee Krasner, Archives of American Art
- ^ "George Ortman". 8 December 2006.
- ^ Crofton, Ian (1991). Encyklopedia Guinnessa. Biuro Uslug Promocyjnych, Universal SA. p. 554.
External links
- Article on Minimalist Art at the Dia Beacon Museum "Dia Beacon", Tiziano Thomas Dossena, Bridge Apulia USA N.9, 2003
- Tate, Definition of Minimal Art
- Tate Glossary: Minimalism
- MoMA, Art terms Minimalism