Minimalism in Art: When Less Was a Provocation

Tate describes minimalism as an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s, built from plain geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle. It emerged in the late 1950s and flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.¹

MoMA adds the key ingredient: relying on industrial technologies and rational processes, minimalist artists challenged traditional notions of craftsmanship, using commercial materials such as fiberglass and aluminum, and often mathematical systems to set out their compositions.²

The idea did not come from nowhere. Britannica sees minimal art as the culmination of a reductionist tendency in modern art that first surfaced with the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich's black square on a white ground,³ which we met in the story of the first abstract paintings.

Malevich called his abstract art Suprematism: basic geometric forms, nothing else. Donald Judd, one of the leading minimalists, later wrote essays on Malevich and his contemporaries.¹ It is the same road that took Mondrian from trees to grids.

Through the 1950s, American avant-garde art was dominated by Action painting, intuitive and spontaneous gesture. The minimalists found it too personal.³ They wanted the opposite: no story, no feelings on display, no illusion.