Late Modernism - Radical Movements in Modern Art - Minimalism and Post-minimalism

Minimalism and Post-minimalism

By the early 1960s Minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction via Malevich, the Bauhaus and Mondrian). Important artists who emerged as pioneers of Minimalism include Frank Stella, Larry Bell, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Tony Smith, Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, Robert Morris, and Ronald Bladen among others. These artists also frequently employed shaped canvases, as in the example by Richard Tuttle shown at right. Minimal art rejected the idea of relational, and subjective painting, the complexity of Abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of Action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella, minimalism in painting and sculpture, as opposed to other areas, is a late modernist movement and depending on the context can be construed as a precursor to the post modern movement.

Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism, examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism. He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."

In the late 1960s the term Post-minimalism was coined by Robert Pincus-Witten to describe minimalist derived art which had content and contextual overtones which minimalism rejected, and was applied to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Barry Le Va, and others.

Rosalind Krauss argues that by 1968 artists such as Morris, LeWitt, Smithson and Serra had "entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist." The expansion of the category of sculpture to include land art and architecture, "brought about the shift into postmodernism."

Minimalists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others continued to produce their late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainder of their careers.