His mother, Blanche, was a department store buyer, and his father, Aloysius Mangold, worked at an organ factory.

By the mid-1970s, Mangold moved on to overlapping shapes whose contours are formed by combinations of canvas edges and both drawn and implied lines.

A 1994 series consisted of monochrome panels, deployed in two-panel trapezoidal works whose colors, sometimes matching, sometimes contrasting, run to deep oranges, olive greens, browns and grays.

[9] In a 1994 review in Art in America, Robert Kushner wrote that “underneath the composure of their execution, there is an almost romantic vividness of experience.

He designed the monumental colored glass panels contained in the Buffalo Federal Courthouse pavilion lobby.

In 1965, the Jewish Museum in New York held the first major exhibition of what was called Minimal art and included Robert Mangold.