What is Minimalist Art? A Deep Dive
Concentric circles on a canvas. One-color pieces with geometric shapes. A single square block in the middle of an art gallery.
At first glance, these pieces might not look like art at all, but they’re part of a larger movement called Minimalism that took the art world by storm in the 1960s and remains ingrained in the art of the modern day.
Minimalism is a celebration of reality in art, showing that you don’t need complex details or big, difficult concepts to create beautiful, meaningful pieces. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Minimalist Art?
Minimalism is a movement that aims to exemplify the beauty in simplicity. It’s an artistic movement that came about in exact opposition to Abstract Expressionism and the other movements that came before it, which were all about intense detail, realistic depictions, or complex abstract pieces.
Minimalist art pieces tend toward being simple and obvious in form and subject. The shapes are concrete and solid, usually geometric - squares, circles, and triangles - and arranged in easy-to-understand base units. They also have, as the name implies, minimal elements to them - maybe only one or two colors or shapes in the entire piece. Color blocks and gradients are important parts of the movement, as are optical illusions using lines and alternating colors.
These pieces tend to be bulky, large installations that are mounted directly onto the floor, walls, or ceiling of the gallery space in which they are displayed, directly interacting with the area and making the architecture or landscape a part of the piece. The point of the art is to highlight the space that it’s in, the reality of the world it exists in.
It typically follows one central theme for a series of works. Some common themes in Minimalist art include:
Empty versus filled space
The interaction of color
Hard edges versus soft transitions
Repetition and patterns
The interplay between light and darkness
The real setting of the art piece
Another important aspect of the movement is individualism. Minimalist art is largely created without critical theory in mind; to a minimalist artist, the opinion of the audience is more important than the opinion of a professional art critic. These pieces are personal in that they are intended to be interacted with on an individual level and interpreted by each person who views them in a new and unique way. Minimalist art doesn’t aim to have one inherent meaning or any meaning at all - it derives value from being observed.
A Brief History of Minimalist Art
The Minimalist movement came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, largely in the United States.
Artists in New York City, such as Frank Stella, began to create art pieces that intentionally dismissed the movements of the previous decades, characterized by the works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and many more which were largely focused on big, sweeping arrangements of actionable color and abstract shapes, full of complex details and hidden meaning. Stella’s Black Paintings were simple, monochromatic pieces that were showcased in the Museum of Modern Art in 1959; they and many like them were inspired by the radical idea that art is given meaning by its context rather than by the artist’s own interpretation.
The movement, which was also called Conceptual, Avant-garde, and Modular art, among others, grew in popularity through the 1960s and into the 1970s, showcasing a focus on “higher beauty” achieved by simply allowing a piece to be in a setting without requiring it to have a deeper meaning. This idea of reality being beautiful eventually built itself into the Photorealism movement, which grew in popularity starting in the late 1960s and continues into the modern era.
Minimalist Artists
Minimalist art was shaped by the artists who were daring enough to try new methods of art creation and change the standard for what art was “supposed” to look like. Here is a small selection of Minimalist artists who had a significant impact on the movement.
Donald Judd
Donald Judd was an American artist who created works in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a veteran who used his frustration with the wars and war as a concept, as well as his time as an art critic for Arts magazine, to inspire his work, which largely focused on three-dimensional space and how that could be explored in sculpture.
Many of Judd’s works were untitled, simple installations of various rectangular prisms composed of metals, Plexiglas, plywood, and other commercial materials. He was well known for producing “stacks” that hung from floor to ceiling, “progressions” that followed logical numerical patterns, and box forms that were often installed directly into gallery floors.
Robert Morris
Robert Morris was another American artist whose work during the 1960s and 1970s came to help define the Minimalist movement as a whole. Many of his pieces were actually prop work for dance performances, putting an emphasis on functionality rather than aesthetics.
Morris’s pieces began as sculptures made from wood, metal, and meshes, then gradually became “self-portraits” he created to critique the idea of self-expression - pseudoscientific pieces created from model brains and electroencephalogram results. In the later part of his career, he began working with softer mediums like felt and thread, even dirt, molded into what should be impossible shapes in some interesting installations in the 1970s.
Ellsworth Kelly
With an impressive 60-year-long career, Ellsworth Kelly was a master of working with strange materials including plastic, which he used to inspire his Line Form Color series. Kelly was also a military veteran who served in World War II, during which time he studied art in Paris, taking inspiration from Jean Arp and Henri Matisse.
From these artists, Kelly pulled abstractions using modern architecture and the interplay of shadow and light. When he returned to the United States in the 1950s, he began painting, creating color panel pieces that stretched as large as 65 ft and were sometimes painted on unusual materials like aluminum. This panel work became his signature, so that in the 1970s, when he lived in New York, he was set to create his Chatham Series, which, in his own words, focused on “the space between the picture and the viewer.”
Carl Andre
Carl Andre is an American artist known for working with blocks, bricks, and, most notably, metal plate arrangements that are installed directly onto the gallery floor. He studied at Phillips Academy in the 1950s before moving to New York City, where he worked with Frank Stella for a time before working in rail yards and visiting Stonehenge in England in the 1960s, which helped to establish his signature sculptural aesthetic. Andre often created pieces that were meant to be interacted with - his square tile exhibit that he invited gallery visitors to step on was a major example of this.
Andre was tried for the murder of his wife Ana Mendieta in 1988, but was acquitted. This deeply damaged his career, causing him to fall out of public favor and withdraw from the art world until 2014, when the Dia Art Foundation hosted a retrospective on his work.
Modern Minimalist Art
Minimalism has become less popular in the world of traditional art - painting, sculpture, etc. - in recent years, giving way to a movement for surrealism and contemporary art, but has remained popular as an interior design aesthetic. Home designers offer open, bright spaces with hard edges and minimal decoration, noting the cleanliness and simplicity of the style as an attractive feature of it.
Though the movement itself has largely ended, minimalism is still present in modern movements. For example, contemporary artists tend to put focus on the interaction between a work and the world in which it was created, touching on the concept of the importance of reality in art that minimalism introduced. “Lowbrow” art takes inspiration from minimalism’s indifference toward critical opinion and its focus on interaction with its audience. Photorealism takes inspiration from minimalism’s focus on space and light, using these concepts to address hyperrealistic subjects in unusual mediums.
Minimalism, like all art movements, created a stepping stone of innovation and new concepts for future movements and artists to build upon, revitalizing the landscape of art as it went.
Conclusion
As with any other artistic movement, Minimalism isn’t for everyone. Some people value complexity and detail in artwork and see minimalist art as cheap or boring. But to those who understand and appreciate it, minimalist art can be impressive, impactful, and full of personalized meaning.
Whether you like it or not, though, Minimalism has had an undeniable impact on the world of art and the aesthetic culture of the twenty-first century. Understanding what that impact is and where it came from might just help you enjoy this simple style a little more.
