Also known as ABC art, literal art, reductivism, systematic painting and art of the real, Minimalism was present in almost every sphere of our lives. He employed traditional materials such as wood, canvas, and paint, but placed a great emphasis on concepts and systems. He was guided by the mantra “less is more”, believing that the most important feature of a housing object is its functionality. For them, less truly is more, and this way of thinking fits perfectly with this large island nation in such little space to operate with. Omissions? Favoring new materials such as steel and glass over concrete, he designed buildings that were functional, modern and visually pleasing. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. While accepting that the use of industrial materials and constructive principles provided the technical paradigm for advanced sculpture, Donald Judd and Robert Morris took their lead from…, …then declined in imitative, all-too-reductionist. The use of bright colors and her dedication to the relationship between meaning and form set her apart from other Minimalists. How Long Minimalism Has Been a Movement . Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership, This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/art/Minimalism, Minimalism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). Let's take a look at some of the most prominent names involved with the movement. She continued making visionary paintings for over three decades. Describing Minimalist sculptures as dependent on the context of their perception, he believed that artwork cannot be self-sufficient in and of itself. Art movement In visual arts, music, and other mediums, minimalism is a style that uses pared-down design elements. It was all sealed with the 1966 Primary Structures group exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York and Sol LeWitt’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art written in 1967. His works explored innovative instrumental timbres through a slowly paced succession of unrelated soft sounds. Minimalism did exist as a movement, although many artists used its principles without actively participating in its creation, and by the late 1960s, it all began showing signs of breaking apart in different directions. Art movement Postminimalism is an art term coined (as post-minimalism) by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism. Minimalism reached its peak during the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, but many of its practitioners are still alive and well today. In Minimalist music, the traditional treatment of form and development was rejected in favour of explorations of timbre and rhythm—musical elements largely unfamiliar to Western listeners. In Minimalist visual arts, the personal, gestural elements were stripped away in order to reveal the objective, purely visual elements of painting and sculpture. Reasonator; PetScan; Scholia; Statistics; OpenStreetMap; Locator tool; Search depicted; Subcategories. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. In many of his works, we can find many elements serving a variety of purposes - for instance, we would design a floor that would also be a radiator. have served as the motto for Minimalism, an art movement that really began in the 1960s, although there were some earlier manifestations. While accepting... Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. The minimalist sculpture was all about the piece, and it had nothing to do with the artist. The term suggests that we are now using what we learned in the “modern” period, but mixing it with ideas from the more distant past. La Monte Young, for example, composed a number of electronic “continuous frequency environments,” in which he generated a few pitches and then electronically sustained them, sometimes for days or weeks. 1960s minimalism Beginning of the movement Frank Stella Robert Morris Donald Judd Sol LeWitt Carl Andre Agnes Martin 4. Minimal art, also called ABC art, is the culmination of reductionist tendencies in modern art that But the popular movement of less-is-more, which dates back to the 1960s, has since seeped into various facets of our lives. Like Pop Art, which emerged simultaneously, Minimalism presented ordinary subject matter in a literal way that lacked expressive features or metaphorical content; likewise, the use of commercial processes smacked of mass production and seemed to reject traditional expectations of skill and originality in art. He later referred to his pieces as “sculptures as place”, alluding to the fact that his pieces are produced by placing objects on the floor. For that reason they attempted to rid their works of any extra-visual association. The expression is used specifically in relation to music and the visual arts, but can refer to any field using minimalism as a critical reference point. Free of the artist’s personal touch, his sculptures were intended to emphasize the purity of the objects themselves rather than any symbolic meaning they might have. A style that evolved as a reaction to Minimalism during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sol LeWitt redefined the art production, reducing it to its essentials. While working as an architect, he designed more than 20 private residencies. After the 1960s when the movement had its peak, some of the artists radically changed their practice and moved in different personal directions. These materials would be stacked on top of each other without fixatives to hold them in place. In that period, … Yet, his practice exceeded Minimalist ethos, being at the forefront of some other movements such as Process Art and Land Art. His visual vocabulary consisted of lines, basic colors, and simplified shapes applied to his own formulae resembling mathematical equations. American Art. Denn wer wenig besitzt, muss sich auch um weniger kümmern, hat dafür aber mehr Platz, Zeit und Geld. The primary structures of the Minimalist sculptors Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Tony Smith, Anthony Caro, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken, Craig Kaufman, Robert Duran, and Robert Morris and the hard-edge painting of Jack Youngerman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, and Gene Davis grew out of these artists’ dissatisfaction with Action painting, a branch of American Abstract Expressionism based on intuitive, spontaneous gesture that had dominated American avant-garde art through much of the 1950s. Art from this period relied on the use of natural pigmentsand stone carvings to create representations of objects, animals, and rituals that governed a civilization’s existence. Hard-edge painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on an overall flat surface; precise, razor-sharp contours; and broad areas of bright, unmodulated colour that have been stained into unprimed canvas. Another one of the art movements from the 1960s, and typified by works composed of simple art, such as geometric shapes devoid of representational content. Some cite Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as being the first leader of minimalist design, and his basic, yet striking structures are constructed simply to maximize space and a feeling of openness. But what exactly did it mean and take to create Minimalist art and why were so many of those working in architecture and design so fascinated by its philosophy and aesthetics? Apart from visual arts, architecture and design, its influence can be found in literature and music, in plays and novels of Samuel Beckett and the compositions of John Cage and Philip Glass. If we look at the old architecture and interior designs, we’ll find that they ooze with simple color, clean lines and forms, following the tendencies present in their culture at large. 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