A movement that gained currency in the United States in the 1960s and spread through various forms of art and design, Minimalism is an artistic approach that strips work down to the fundamentals, dictating that a composition arise from the smallest manipulation of its materials necessary to evoke an intended response. In the visual arts, Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction against the spontaneous and gestural quality of Abstract Expressionism, which emphasized the hand of the artist. The Minimalists--who included the painters Frank Stella and Agnes Martin, the sculptors Donald Judd … (read more)

A movement that gained currency in the United States in the 1960s and spread through various forms of art and design, Minimalism is an artistic approach that strips work down to the fundamentals, dictating that a composition arise from the smallest manipulation of its materials necessary to evoke an intended response. In the visual arts, Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction against the spontaneous and gestural quality of Abstract Expressionism, which emphasized the hand of the artist. The Minimalists--who included the painters Frank Stella and Agnes Martin, the sculptors Donald Judd and Richard Serra, and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt--believed that their works should lack expression, be objective, and refer only to itself or the materials used to create it.

Rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, Minimalism found art-historical precedents in the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp and the monochrome paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Yves Klein. A classic example of Minimalist art can be found in Stella's "Black Paintings," which were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. In these monochrome geometric paintings, the stripes that radiate in a concentric pattern from the center of the canvas were painted in commercial black enamel paint, with both the width of the stripes and the frame dictated by the dimensions of a standard-issue two-and-a-half-inch wide housepainter's brush. Referring to these paintings, Stella uttered what could be the manifesto of the Minimalists: “What you see is what you see.”

With their interest in attaining a bare, boiled-down purity in their art, some of the Minimalists--particularly Judd and Martin--infused their work with a spiritual quality that shares affinities with Quietism, a philosophical school that grounds its search for greater truth in the building blocks of philosophy itself, including language. In other mediums, Minimalism describes art that is similarly reduced to its bare essentials, such as in the musical compositions of John Cage or the choreography of Trisha Brown.

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