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Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and Minimalist music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. 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. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimalism art practices. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Sol LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.Dempsey, Amy. Styles, Schools and Movements, Thames & Hudson, 2002. "The artists themselves did not like the label because of the negative implication that their work was simplistic and devoid of 'art content'."
Judd's sculpture was showcased in 1964 at the Green Gallery in Manhattan as were Flavin's first fluorescent light works, while other leading Manhattan galleries like the Leo Castelli and the Pace Gallery also began to showcase artists focused on geometric abstraction. In addition there were two seminal and influential museum exhibitions: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture shown from April 27 to June 12, 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York, organized by the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine Time, June 3, 1966, "Engineer's Esthetic", p. 64 Newsweek, May 16, 1966, "The New Druids", p. 104 and Systemic Painting, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curated by Lawrence Alloway also in 1966 that showcased geometric abstraction in the American art world via shaped canvas, color field, and hard-edge painting. Systemic Painting, Guggenheim Museum Systemic art, Oxford-Art encyclopedia Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, Google books online In the wake of those exhibitions and a few others the art movement called minimal art emerged.
The European roots of minimalism are found in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. Maureen Mullarkey, Art Critical, "Giorgio Morandi" Daniel Marzona, Uta Grosenick; Minimal art, p. 12 Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of abstract expressionism that had been dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: a critical anthology, pp. 161–172
One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter Frank Stella, whose early "pinstripe" paintings (the earliest group of which are also referred to as the Black Paintings) were included in the 1959 show, , organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Stellas's pinstripe paintings were 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 . 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 and Gene Davis, had also begun to explore stripes, Monochrome, and hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.
Yves Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the artist's book in November 1954.Hannah Weitemeier, "Yves Klein, 1928–1962: International Klein Blue", Original-Ausgabe (Cologne: Taschen, 1994), 15. .
Ad Reinhardt, whose reductionism nearly all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, wrote of the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature." Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New York: Viking Press, 1975): .
Reinhardt's remark directly contradicts Hans Hofmann's regard for nature as the source of his own abstract expressionist paintings. A famous exchange in 1942 between Hofmann and Jackson Pollock was recorded by Lee Krasner in an interview with Dorothy Strickler (on 1964-11-02) for the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art. Lee Krasner, Archives of American Art In Krasner's words:
The most notable critique of minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a formalist critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "Theatre". In "Art and Objecthood", published in Artforum in June 1967, he declared that the minimal work of art, particularly minimal sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act of observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of minimal art. Fried's essay was immediately challenged by postminimalist and Land art Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated: "what Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing – namely being himself theatrical".
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