Minimalism

By the early 1960s, several New York artists concluded that Abstract Expressionism's drama of the self — all gesture, emotion and personal myth — had become its own kind of academic convention. Minimalism stripped painting and sculpture back to the irreducible: Donald Judd's stacked steel boxes, Dan Flavin's fluorescent tubes arranged in corners, Frank Stella's geometrically striped canvases, Agnes Martin's hand-ruled grids on pale ground. These objects refused to be "about" anything beyond what they physically were — specific objects occupying specific space. Stella's formula, borrowed from Jasper Johns, was definitive: "What you see is what you see." The movement drew on ideas from Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Concrete Art of Max Bill, but its tone was distinctly American: rational, anti-theatrical, sceptical of metaphor. In parallel, the British painter Bridget Riley and the Hungarian-French Victor Vasarely were developing Op Art — an equally reduced but perceptually dynamic approach based on optical illusion through systematic pattern.

How to recognise it

Extreme economy of means is the defining feature: a Minimalist painting typically uses only one or two colours, one or two shapes, and a systematically repeated or varied element. Surfaces are impersonal and precise — no visible gesture, no expressive variation in paint application, often industrial materials or fabrication. Geometric forms dominate: rectangles, stripes, grids, concentric rings. Large scale and monochrome or near-monochrome palettes are common. Agnes Martin's canvases appear almost blank until you are close enough to see the faint pencil grid. Stella's early work is all parallel stripes — of aluminium paint, of bare canvas — running exactly parallel to the shaped edges of the support. If the painting seems to have eliminated everything that is not structurally necessary, you are in Minimalist territory.