Minimalism
Art reduced to essentials, focusing on the object and viewer's experience.
Minimalism is an art movement that emerged in the post-World War II era in Western art, often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism. It emphasizes reducing art to its essentials, focusing on the object itself and the viewer's experience, with as little mediation from the artist as possible. The movement preceded postminimalism, which encompasses various practices in contemporary art that extend or critically reflect on minimalism's original aims.
- field
- Visual arts, music, design, architecture, literature, film
- known_for
- Reduction to essentials, hard-edge painting, geometric sculpture, repetition in music, literalist art
- associated_visual_artists
- Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, Frank Stella
- associated_musicians
- La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Julius Eastman, John Adams
- associated_designers
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Adolf Loos
Lore & Background
Minimalism in the visual arts, sometimes called 'minimal art', 'literalist art', and 'ABC Art', refers to a specific movement of artists that emerged in New York in the early 1960s in response to abstract expressionism. American minimalist artists were heavily influenced by earlier European abstract movements, including the German Bauhaus artists, Russian Constructivists, and Dutch De Stijl artists. Radical abstraction was invented by each of these groups, encouraging artists such as Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd to pursue new artistic trajectories. In order to provide the audience with an instantaneous, purely visual reaction, these artists sought to produce art that had no references to anything other than itself, removing subjective, gestural components to expose objective visual components.
Reader's Guide
Minimalism's significance lies in its radical assertion that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself and should omit any extra-visual association. This was in part a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism that had dominated the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s. In sculpture, minimalism is characterized by simple geometric shapes often made of industrial materials like plastic, metal, aluminum, concrete, and fiberglass, left raw or painted a solid color. The movement also influenced music, with minimal music featuring methods like repetition and gradual variation. The term is sometimes used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and the automobile designs of Colin Chapman. In design and architecture, minimalism became popular in the late 1980s in London and New York, focusing on effectively using vacant space, neutral colors, and eliminating decoration to emphasize materiality, tactility, texture, weight, and density. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto 'Less is more' to describe his aesthetic.
Did You Know?
- Michael Fried called minimalist artists 'literalists', using the term pejoratively because he believed art should deliver transcendental experience with metaphors, symbolism, and stylization.
- Minimalist architecture was influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture, which was rooted in Zen philosophy and practiced long before the Western version.
- Donald Judd's pieces were described as objects sitting in the desert sun waiting for a visitor to discover them and accept them as art.
- The term 'minimalism' is also used to describe the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.
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