Minimal Art and Artists

MINIMAL ART AND ARTISTS

IN THE 1960s AND AFTER

By Laura Garrard

All of the main practitioners and theoreticians of the still-influential 1960s Minimal art movement and style are studied here: Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, Robert Smithson, Brice Marden, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and many land artists. 

Minimal artists studied in this book also include Agnes Martin, Hans Haacke, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Robert Mangold and Tony Smith.

There are chapters on Minimal aesthetics; Minimal painting and painters; Minimal sculptors and sculpture; and  Minimal art and land artists. 

Probably the premier Minimal artist (and philosopher) is Donald Judd; Judd stands at the centre of Minimal art, and no account of Minimalism is complete without placing Judd in the foreground. Judd is such an inspiring and provocative artist; his works form some of the most significant art of the past 50 years. 

Some Minimalists have been taken up by feminists as icons (Eva Hesse). Some continued to work in mainly Minimal art throughout their careers (Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Brice Marden, Carl Andre), while others moved into Process art (Robert Morris), Conceptual art (Hans Haacke), performance art, body art, installation art, and feminist art (Judy Chicago). Some dipped in and out of Minimal art (Gerhard Richter). These artists, and the art they produced, form the main subject of this book. 

Terms for Minimalism like ‘reductionist’, ‘Rejective Art’, ‘non-hierarchical’, ‘non-relational’, ‘non-anthropomorphic’, ‘Gestalt’, ‘environmental’, ‘Serial’, ‘Cool art’, ‘Know-Nothing Nihilism’ and ‘Idiot Art’, were also employed. As Harold Rosenberg pointed out, few art movements had so many terms applied to it, and so many different definitions. For an art that was supposed to be about all things ‘minimal’, it attracted a lot of discussion. ‘The rule applied is: The less there is to see, the more there is to say’. 

REVISED AND UPDATED, WITH NEW ILLUSTRATIONS

Fully illustrated. 280 pages. Large format. 

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