Collection: Minimalism

Minimalism in painting and sculpture took shape in New York in the early 1960s as a reaction against the gestural emotion of Abstract Expressionism. The movement insisted on industrial fabrication, simple geometric forms, serial repetition, and the literal physical presence of the object over psychological or symbolic content. Donald Judd's 1965 essay Specific Objects gave the position its theoretical centre, arguing that the new work was neither painting nor sculpture but a third category specific to itself. Critics also called it Literalist Art, ABC Art, and Primary Structures.

The central figures were Donald Judd (1928–1994), Carl Andre (1935–2024), Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), Robert Morris (1931–2018), Dan Flavin (1933–1996), and Frank Stella (1936–2024), with the painters Agnes Martin (1912–2004), Anne Truitt (1921–2004), and Tony Smith working parallel programmes. Stella's Black Paintings of 1959, shown at the Museum of Modern Art's Sixteen Americans exhibition that year, marked the public arrival of the new sensibility. The 1966 exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York consolidated the group, and Flavin's fluorescent tube installations from 1963 onward extended the programme into light. The doctrine carried into postwar architecture through Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's principle of less is more.