Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art andmusic, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments inpost–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction toabstract expressionism and a bridge topostminimal art practices. Prominent artists associated with this movement includeAd Reinhardt,Nassos Daphnis,Tony Smith,Donald Judd,John McCracken,Agnes Martin,Dan Flavin,Robert Morris,Larry Bell,Anne Truitt,Yves Klein andFrank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.^[1]

Minimalism in visual art, generally referred to as "minimal art",literalist art,^[2] andABC Art^[3] emerged in New York in the early 1960s.^[4] Initially minimal art appeared in New York in the 60s as new and older artists moved towardgeometric 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 includingDonald Judd,Carl Andre,Dan Flavin,David Smith,Anthony Caro, Tony Smith,Sol LeWitt, and others.

Judd's sculpture was showcased in 1964 at theGreen Gallery in Manhattan as were Flavin's first fluorescent light works, while other leading Manhattan galleries like theLeo Castelli Gallery and thePace Gallery also began to showcase artists focused on geometric abstraction. In addition there were two seminal and influential museum exhibitions:Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture shown from April 27 to June 12, 1966 at theJewish Museum inNew York, organized by the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine^[5][6] andSystemic Painting, at theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum curated byLawrence Alloway also in 1966 that showcasedgeometric abstraction in the American art world viashaped canvas,color field, andhard-edge painting.^[7][8][9] In the wake of those exhibitions and a few others theart movement calledminimal art emerged.

The European roots of minimalism are found in thegeometric abstractions of painters associated with theBauhaus, in the works ofKazimir Malevich,Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with theDe Stijl movement, and theRussian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptorConstantin Brâncuși.^[10][11] Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings ofBarnett Newman,Ad Reinhardt,Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse asPablo Picasso,Marcel Duchamp,Giorgio Morandi, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity ofabstract expressionism that had been dominant in theNew York School during the 1940s and 1950s.^[12]

In contrast to the previous decade's more subjective abstract expressionists, some minimalists explicitly stated that their art was not about self-expression, theirs was 'objective'. In general, minimalism's features includedgeometric, oftencubic forms purged of muchmetaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.

One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter Frank Stella, whose early "pinstripe" paintings (the earliest group of which are also referred to as theBlack Paintings) were included in the 1959 show,16 Americans, organized byDorothy Miller at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Stellas's pinstripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used for stretchers, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog,Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paintstripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally charged paintings ofWillem de Kooning orFranz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward the less gestural, often somber,color field paintings ofBarnett Newman andMark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MoMA show, artists includingKenneth Noland andGene Davis, had also begun to explore stripes,monochromatic, andhard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.^[13]

Monochrome painting had been initiated at the firstIncoherent arts' exhibition in 1882 in Paris, with a black painting by poetPaul Bilhaud entitledCombat de Nègres dans un tunnel (Negroes fight in a tunnel). In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writerAlphonse Allais proposed seven other monochrome paintings, such asPremière communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige (First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow, white), orRécolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge (Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea, red). However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th centuryDada, orNeo-Dada, and particularly the works of theFluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich.

Yves Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of theartist's bookYves: Peintures in November 1954.^[14][15]

Ad Reinhardt, whosereductive nearly all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, wrote of the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."^[16]

Reinhardt's remark directly contradictsHans Hofmann's regard for nature as the source of his own abstract expressionist paintings. A famous exchange in 1942 between Hofmann andJackson Pollock was recorded byLee Krasner in an interview with Dorothy Strickler (on 1964-11-02) for the Smithsonian InstitutionArchives of American Art.^[17] In Krasner's words:

When I broughtHofmann up to meet Pollock and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann's reaction was—one of the questions he asked Jackson was, "Do you work from nature?" There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson's answer was, "I am nature." And Hofmann's reply was, "Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself." 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.Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published inArts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of minimalist aesthetics. 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, includingJasper Johns, Dan Flavin andLee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work ofGeorge Earl Ortman,^[18] who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These specific objects inhabited a space not comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoid easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.^{[citation needed]}

This movement was heavily criticized bymodernist formalist art critics and historians. Some critics thought minimal art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by criticClement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. Another critique of minimal art concerns that many artists were designers of the work while they were executed by unknowncraftsmen.^[19]

The most notable critique of minimalism was produced byMichael Fried, aformalist critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In "Art and Objecthood", published inArtforum in June 1967, he declared that the minimal work of art, particularly minimal sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work likeRobert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type ofspectacle, in which the artifice of the act ofobservation and the viewer'sparticipation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of minimal art. Fried's essay was immediately challenged bypostminimalist andearth artistRobert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue ofArtforum. Smithson stated: "what Fried fears most is theconsciousness of what he is doing – namely being himself theatrical".

• Minimalism
• List of minimalist artists
• Maximalism

• Article on Minimalist Art at the Dia Beacon Museum "Dia Beacon", Tiziano Thomas Dossena, Bridge Apulia USA N.9, 2003
• Tate, Definition of Minimal Art
• Tate Glossary: Minimalism
• MoMA, Art termsMinimalism