Minimalism describes
movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual
art and music, where the work is set out to expose the
essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all
non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism is any design
or style in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create
the maximum effect.
As
a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in
post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual
arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. It is rooted in the reductive
aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction
against Abstract expressionism and a bridge
to Postminimal art practices. The word was first used
in English in the early 20th century to describe the Mensheviks.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, Oil on Canvas
Key
characteristics: Minimalist
art was normally precise and hard-edged. It incorporated geometric
forms often in repetitive patterns and solid planes of color,
normally cool hues or unmixed colors straight from the
tube. Minimalists wanted their viewer to experience their work
without the distractions of composition, theme, and other elements of
traditional work. The Minimalists' emphasis on eradicating signs
of authorship from the artwork (by using simple, geometric forms, and
courting the appearance of industrial objects) led, inevitably, to
the sense that the meaning of the object lay not "inside"
it, but rather on its surface - it arose from the viewer's
interaction with the object. This led to a new emphasis on the
physical space in which the artwork resided.
Artists: Kazimir
Malevich; Pieter
Mondriaan; Pablo
Picasso; Barnett
Newman; Josef
Albers.
One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, four of whose early "black paintings" were included in the 1959 show, 16 Americans, organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's black paintings were often 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 paint stripes. 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 of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward the less gestural, often somber, color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MoMA show, artists including Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had also begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.
ReplyDeleteThis is the most strange kind of art - minimalism, I was always hacked with the pictures of it. But maybe this make the style individual.
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