Minimalism (visual arts)
Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella.
[4] Initially minimal art appeared in New York in the 60s as new and older artists moved toward geometric abstraction; exploring via painting in the cases of Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman and others; and sculpture in the works of various artists including David Smith, Anthony Caro, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and others.
[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.
In general, minimalism's features included geometric, often cubic forms purged of much metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.
Although Stella received immediate attention from the MoMA show, artists including Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis, had also begun to explore stripes, monochromatic, and hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.
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.
To which Jackson did not reply at all.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.
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.
Fried's essay was immediately challenged by postminimalist and earth artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum.
