3/1/2024 0 Comments Minimalist painting![]() ![]() Frank Stella, generally considered the first American Minimalist, broke out onto the New York scene with a thunderous clang in 1959 thanks to his famous Black Paintings. Believing art should only refer to itself, many moved from pictorial painting toward sculpture or printing in order to better their techniques. Original Minimalists intended to produce even more literal depictions of the world around them. When Did Minimalism Begin? Installation View Of 16 Americans by Soichi Sunami, 1959, via MoMA, New York Following suit, Color Field painters Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko soon spearheaded another new visual style, stressing aesthetic simplicity and pigmented palettes. His Homage To The Square (1950) exemplifies these key tenets through contrasting colors, shapes, and shadows, entrenched in empirical design studies. Painter Josef Albers then cemented Minimalist ideas in modern art education by emphasizing illusionary pictorial depth throughout his Black Mountain College incumbency. In 1937, proto-Minimalist sculptor Constantin Brancusi tested this notion by traveling to Romania and erecting his 98-foot-high Endless Column, a rhombic tower paying tribute to fallen local soldiers. He believed all revolutionary art should force viewers to further interrogate systems of power, thereby uncovering a deeper meaning. This could largely be attributed to the 1920s acclaim of Marcel Duchamp, who crusaded against the idea that art should be only emotionally motivated. These forerunners catalyzed an objective reassessment of what it meant to be an artist. Homage To The Square by Josef Albers, 1959, via The Guggenheim Museum, New York VI (1920) reveal this generational desire to eliminate figurative techniques, reducing reality to a series of geometric forms. Other trailblazers like Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian, whose simple yet powerful paintings illuminated canvassed flatness, continued this practice throughout the 1920s. Paintings no longer served as objective mirrors of a three-dimensional society, but rather self-referential objects, exploring the ways in which a surface could overcome its own physical limitations. Together with Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian leaders took a specific interest in fusing emerging technology with everyday life, compiling common objects to shave art down to its truest form. ![]() Though New York City ultimately incubated the genre’s popularity in the mid-20th-century, its origins date as early as 1915, when avant-garde artist Kasimir Malevich painted his wayward Black Square. Modernism’s reductionist tendencies laid a Minimalist foundation long before the term materialized. II by Piet Mondrian, 1920, via Tate, London
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |