Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques: Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer in the 1960s 1032178094, 9780429456855

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Systemic Painting: A Medium at a Crossroads
"A Current American Tendency”
"Systemic” Defined
The Installation
The Critical Response
2. Robert Mangold: Minimalist Dialectics in the Walls and Areas
Minimalist Dialectics
Dialectics in Formation
"Flat Art”: Painting Between Object and Concept
"Just Nothing,” “Minimal,” “Third Stream”
Prefabricated Architecture and Decorator Colors
Lippard’s Impossible Synthesis
Mangold’s Sublation
3. David Novros: Painting in the House of Literalism
Novros and Judd in Dialogue
Judd on Painting
Discovering the “Painted Place”
Novros at Park Place
The Dwan Shows
The Fiberglass Paintings
A Specific Fresco
4. Jo Baer: Painting Reframed
Baer’s Minimalism
New York to Los Angeles and Back
The Koreans: “Paintings, Not Pictures”
Baer, Beckett, and the Framing of Subjectivity 
The Fischbach Show, Diptychs, and Triptychs
Painting and “The System”
The Frames of Sixties Painting
Why Don’t You Use Pink?”: Baer Amongst the Modernists
The Artforum Letter
Coda: Framing the Self(ie)
5 Conclusion: Against Endgames
Index

Citation preview

Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques

This book undertakes a critical reappraisal of Minimalism through an examination of three key painters: Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer. By establishing their substantive engagements with Minimalist discourse, as well as their often overlooked artistic exchanges with their sculptor peers, it demonstrates that painting crucially informed the movement’s development, serving not only as an object of critique but also as a crucible for its most central tenets. It also poses broader disciplinary implications as it historicizes and challenges Minimalism’s “death of painting” critiques that have been so influential to theories of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts. Matthew L. Levy is Assistant Professor of Art History at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy George Smith Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition Commemorating the Present Peter D. Osborne Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation The Birth of a Medium Paul Crowther Geneses of Postmodern Art Technology as Iconology Paul Crowther Art, Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain Kate Sloan Film and Modern American Art The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting Katherine Manthorne Play and the Artist’s Creative Process The Work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi Elly Thomas Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer in the 1960s Matthew L. Levy For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer in the 1960s Matthew L. Levy

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Matthew L. Levy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-31458-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45685-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction

vii xii 1

1. Systemic Painting: A Medium at a Crossroads “A Current American Tendency” 13 “Systemic” Defined 17 The Installation 21 The Critical Response 25

13

2. Robert Mangold: Minimalist Dialectics in the Walls and Areas Minimalist Dialectics 35 Dialectics in Formation 39 “Flat Art”: Painting Between Object and Concept 51 “Just Nothing,” “Minimal,” “Third Stream” 63 Prefabricated Architecture and Decorator Colors 69 Lippard’s Impossible Synthesis 74 Mangold’s Sublation 78

35

3. David Novros: Painting in the House of Literalism Novros and Judd in Dialogue 88 Judd on Painting 89 Discovering the “Painted Place” 95 Novros at Park Place 98 The Dwan Shows 109 The Fiberglass Paintings 116 A Specific Fresco 118

88

4. Jo Baer: Painting Reframed Baer’s Minimalism 133 New York to Los Angeles and Back 135 The Koreans: “Paintings, Not Pictures” 139

133

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Contents Baer, Beckett, and the Framing of Subjectivity 141 The Fischbach Show, Diptychs, and Triptychs 149 Painting and “The System” 156 The Frames of Sixties Painting 162 “Why Don’t You Use Pink?”: Baer Amongst the Modernists 165 The Artforum Letter 169 Coda: Framing the Self(ie) 174

5

Conclusion: Against Endgames

184

Index

195

Illustrations

Plates 1 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue, 1964–65, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, three panels, each panel 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). Philip Johnson Fund, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2 Robert Mangold, Untitled (Pale Red), 1973, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182. 9 cm). Gift of Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935. Yale University Art Gallery. 3 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Red Wall, oil paint on fiberboard, 96.5 × 96.5 in. (245 × 245 cm). Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery. Tate, London. 4 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Yellow Wall (Section I + II), 1964, oil and acrylic on plywood and metal, two panels, overall size: 96 1/2 × 96 1/2 in. (244 × 244 cm). The Nancy Lee and Perry Bass Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2004.124.1. 5 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Manila-Neutral Area, 1965–67, oil on shaped composition board, two parts, 96 1/4 × 96 5/16 in. (244.5 × 244.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Philip Johnson 72.41a-b. 6 David Novros, Untitled, 1970, fresco, 156 × 204 in. (396.2 × 518.2 cm), 101 Spring Street, New York. Courtesy of Judd Foundation Archives. 7 David Novros, 6:30, 1966–2006, acrylic on canvas on six wood panels, 72 × 103 in. (182.9 × 261.6 cm). The Menil Collection Houston, gift of the artist. 8 David Novros (b. 1941), Untitled, 1969, lacquer on fiberglass, six panels total, overall: 72 × 156 in. (182.9 × 296.2 cm). 9 Jo Baer (b. 1929), detail of Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue, 1964–65, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, three panels, each panel 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). Philip Johnson Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 10 Ralph Humphrey (1932–1990), Wentworth, 1964, oil on canvas, 60 × 84 in. (152.4 × 213.4 cm). 11 Jules Olitski (1922–2007), Patutsky in Paradise, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 144 15/16 × 161 in. (292 × 409 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Purchase 1982, 82/169.

Figures I.1

Installation view of a Donald Judd exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, between February 5 and March 2, 1966; Rudy Burckhardt, photographer. Leo Castelli Gallery records, circa 1880–2000, bulk 1957–99. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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viii I.2

I.3 I.4

I.5

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7 2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

2.7

2.8

Illustrations Robert Morris installation at the Green Gallery in New York, 1964; Rudy Burckhardt, photographer. Rudy Burckhardt papers, 1934–2015. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. A Romantic Minimalism, installation view, September 3–October 11, 1967. Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Frank Stella, Union Pacific, 1960, aluminum paint on canvas, 77 1/4 × 148 1/2 × 2 5/8 in. (196.2 × 377.2 × 6.7 cm). Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, 1976.62. Frank Stella, Moultonville III, 1965–66, enamel on canvas, 88 × 123 in. (223.5 × 312.4 cm). Gift of the Friends of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. F67–13. Installation view: Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Installation view: Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Installation view: Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Al Held (1928–2005), The Big N, 1964, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 9 ft. 3/8 in. × 9 ft. (275.2 × 274.3 cm). Mrs. Armand P. Bartos Fund, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Will F. Insley (American, 1929–2011), Wall at Dawn, 1963–64, acrylic on masonite, 103 1/8 × 103 1/8 in. (261.9 × 261.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 68.212. Installation of Neil Williams, Sartorial Habits of Billy Bo, 1966, in Systemic Painting. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Nicholas Krushenk, Tel Aviv Hippy, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 90 × 75 1/2 in. (229 × 192 cm). Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Brown Corner, 1964, oil and aluminum on wood, 7 7/8 × 12 1/2 in. (20 × 31.8 cm). Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Onement IV, oil and casein on canvas, 33 × 38 in. (84 × 97 cm). Fund for Contemporary Art and National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Gray window wall, oil on wood (destroyed). Robert Grosvenor (b. 1937), Transoxiana, 1965, wood, polyester, steel, 10 ft. 6 in. × 31 ft. × 3 ft. (320 × 945 × 91.4 cm). Installation view, Sol LeWitt, John Daniels Gallery, New York, May 4–29, 1965. Robert Mangold (b. 1937), 1/3 Gray-Green Curved Area, 1966, oil on masonite, two panels, 48 × 83 3/4 in. (121.9 × 212.7 cm) overall. The Solomon R. Guggenhim Museum. Panza Collection, 1991. Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Gray-Green Quarter Circle, acrylic on masonite, 14 × 14 in. (35.6 × 35.6 cm). Collection of the Sol LeWitt Estate. Robert Mangold (b. 1937), WVX Series, 1970, graphite and pen and black ink on wove paper, 22 × 18 in. (55.9 × 45.7 cm). The Dorothy

3 5

6

7 14 15 16

22

23

24 24 42

45 47 49 55

56

57

Illustrations

2.9

2.10

2.11

2.12

3.1 3.2

3.3 3.4

3.5

3.6

3.7 3.8

3.9

3.10

and Herbert Vogel Collection, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, Patrons’ Permanent Fund and Gift of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1991.241.88. Robert Mangold (b. 1937), V Series Central Diagonal 2 (Green), 1968, synthetic polymer paint on composition board in four parts, overall 48 1/4 in. × 8 ft. 1/2 in. (122.5 × 245.1 cm). Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966, baked enamel on steel units over baked enamel on aluminum, 20 in. × 13 ft. 7 in. × 13 ft. 7 in. (50.8 × 398.9 × 398.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Agnes Gund and purchase (by exchange). Installation view of Sol LeWitt one-man exhibition at Dwan Gallery, New York, 1966; Dwan Gallery (New York, NY), photographer. Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles, California and New York, New York) records, 1959–circa 1982, bulk 1959–71. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Installation view, Robert Mangold: Column Structure Paintings, Pace Wildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, February 9–March 10, 2007. Donald Judd (1928–1994), Untitled, oil on canvas, 67 1/2 × 67 1/2 in. (171.5 × 171.5 cm). Alfred Jensen (1903–1981), Mayan Temple, Per II: Palenque, oil on canvas, 76 × 50 in. (193.1 × 127 cm). Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1968. The Alhambra, Granada, Spain. Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Apollo, 1953, gouache découpé, collage on white painted paper glued to canvas, 129 × 167 in. (327 × 423 cm). Purchased 1968 with contribution from The Friends of Moderna Museet, The Gerard Bonnier Foundation, and Carl-Bertel Nathhorst Scientific Foundation. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Installation of Mark di Suvero and David Novros at the Park Place Gallery, January 23–February 24, 1966; John D. Schiff, photographer. Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc., and Paula Cooper Gallery records, 1961–2006. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Letter from David Novros to his father, Lester Novros, dated “12 Jan” (dated 1966 by archivist). David Novros papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. David Novros (b. 1941), 2:16, 1965, acrylic on canvas, two panels, overall: 132 × 192 in. (335.3 × 487.8 cm). David Novros (b. 1941), 4:32, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 144 × 156 in. (365.8 × 396.2 cm). Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Lannan Foundation, 1999. David Novros (b. 1941), 4:24, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 92 1/2 × 100 3/8 × 1 5/8 in. (235 × 255 × 4.1 cm). Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Lannan Foundation, 1999. Forrest Myers with sculpture, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22.

ix

59

60

61

62

64 91

92 96

99

100

101 102

103

104 105

x

Illustrations

3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15

3.16 4.1

4.2 4.3

4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

4.8

4.9

4.10

4.11 4.12

Anthony Magar with sculpture, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22. Edwin Ruda with paintings, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22. Tamara Melcher with paintings, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 23. David Novros with paintings, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22. David Novros (b. 1941), VI:XXXII, 1966 (repainted in 1990), vinyl lacquer paint on shaped canvases, six parts; 14 ft. 7 1/4 in. × 6 ft. 9 3/4 in. (445.1 × 207.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Charles Cowles. David Novros, Untitled, 1977, fresco, Gooch Auditorium, University of Texas Health Science Center, Dallas, TX. Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled (Korean), 1962, oil on linen, 71 7/8 × 71 7/8 in. (182.6 × 182.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Arthur Fleischer, Jr. 95.217. Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled, gouache on paper, 6 × 6 in. (15 × 15 cm). Collection of Eric Diefenbach and James Keith Brown. Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled (White star), 1960–61, oil on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (183 × 183 cm). Purchased with support from the Mondriaan Foundation. The Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. John Wesley (b. 1928), Bird Girl, 1963, Duco and oil on canvas, 78 × 48 in. (198 × 122 cm). Collection of Robert and Esta Epstein. Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled, gouache on paper, 10 × 23 in. (25.4 × 59.1 cm). Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled, gouache on paper, 8 3/8 × 11 1/4 in. (21.3 × 28.6 cm). Installation view of Jo Baer solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1966. Reproduced in David Bourdon, “Boxing Up Space,” Village Voice, February 24, 1966. Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled (Vertical Flanking Diptych-Blue), 1966–69, acrylic on canvas, overall: 96 × 136 in. (243.8 × 345.4 cm). Gift of Diane B. Lloyd-Butler. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I, 1957, combine: oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and printed paper on canvas, 61 1/2 × 35 3/4 in. (156.2 × 90.8 cm). The Panza Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957, combine: oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and printed paper on canvas, 61 3/8 × 35 1/2 in. (156.2 × 90.8 cm). Purchase and an anonymous gift and Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest (both by exchange), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mel Bochner, Page from “Working Drawings Book”: (Jo Baer), 1966, photocopy on paper. Mel Bochner, Page from “Working Drawings Book”: (Jo Baer), 1966, photocopy on paper.

105 106 106 107

111 124

135 137

138 138 150 150

151

152

153

153 157 157

Illustrations 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16

4.17

4.18

5.1

5.2 5.3

5.4

Article by Herbert Marcuse in Arts Magazine, May 1967, 26. Reproduction of Jo Baer, Primary Light Group. Article by Herbert Marcuse in Arts Magazine, May 1967, 27. Reproduction of Mathias Klarwein, Grain of Sand (detail), 1963–65. Article by Herbert Marcuse in Arts Magazine, May 1967, 31. Jo Baer (b. 1929) Grey Side-Bar: Green Line, 1975, oil on canvas, 72 × 72 × 1 1/2 in. (182.88. × 182.88 × 3.81 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by the Hauptman Family Foundation, Alice and Nahum Lainer, and the Peter Norton Family Foundation (M.2007.36). Jo Baer, Untitled (Wraparound Triptych—Blue, Green, Lavender), 1969–74, oil on canvas, three canvases, each 48 × 52 in. (122 × 132 cm). Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. Jo Baer (b. 1929), V. Eutopicus, ca. 1973, oil on canvas, 80 × 22 × 4 in. (203.2 × 55.9 × 10.2 cm). Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum. Robert Ryman (b. 1930), Untitled, 1965, oil on linen, 11 1/4 × 11 1/8 in. (28.6 × 28.3 cm). Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rudolf Stingel, Installation view, Daniel Newburg, New York, 1991. Katharina Grosse, Untitled Trumpet, 2015, acrylic on wall and floor, and various objects, 260 × 826 13/16 × 511 13/16 in. (660 × 2100 × 1300 cm). Installation view: All the World’s Futures, 56th Art Biennale, La Biennale di Venezia. Allan McCollum (b. 1944), Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates, 1982 (cast and painted in 1984), enamel on cast Hydrostone, 40 panels overall ranging from 5 × 4 1/8 in. (12.8 × 10.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Robert and Meryl Meltzer and Robert F. and Anna Marie Shapiro Funds.

xi 158 158 161

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186 190

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Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making and has benefited from the support and guidance of many individuals and institutions. I first must thank the artists who are its subject—Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer—each of whom has been supportive of this project and has taken the time to answer my questions during the course of my research. I must especially single out David for thanks. His unstinting support of my research and trust in my writing has meant a great deal to me personally, and my time spent in his studio and at his kitchen table has been the source of many of my happiest memories of my work on this project. At New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Robert Storr advised the doctoral dissertation from which this book originated. I will always be grateful to him for remaining committed to my work even after leaving NYU for another institution. His example of art historical writing that thinks with art and alongside artists is one to which I continually aspire. Also at NYU, Thomas Crow and Robert Slifkin served as dissertation readers and provided valuable feedback that informed this project’s evolution to its current form. My doctoral work was supported by Institute of Fine Arts graduate fellowships, as well as a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. Research was conducted at the Archives of American Art, as well as at the archives of the Blanton Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Menil Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. I thank the employees of these institutions for their assistance. I completed additional research and revisions while teaching at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. I would like to thank my colleagues there for their camaraderie and support in navigating the publication process, particularly Joe Beilein, Joe Bookman, John Champagne, Eric Corty, Sharon Dale, Jill Kambs, Janet Neigh, Tom Noyes, and Dan Schank. Vicki Kazmerski offered valuable insight into the perceptual psychology of Jo Baer’s paintings. I also thank the librarians at Behrend’s John M. Lilley Library for their assistance in the completion of my research. A Behrend Chancellor’s Seed Grant afforded me the opportunity to conduct additional object-based research at the David Novros retrospective at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve. Behrend’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies contributed to the cost of image rights and reproductions. I would also like to thank the organizers and session chairs of the conferences at which I have presented this research, particularly Jessamine Battario, Susanneh Bieber, Elizabeth Buhe, Eva Ehninger, Sarah Hayden, Antje Krause-Wahl, George Philip LeBourdais, Jeannie McKetta, and Roja Najafi, all of whom offered valuable

Acknowledgments

xiii

feedback. Liam Considine, Colin Garretson, Mark Haxthausen, and Rory O’Dea have all read significant portions of this manuscript at various stages in its development, and I thank them for their critical acumen and encouragement. The reports from three anonymous external readers selected by Routledge strengthened this text and helped me clarify its stakes. I also thank Isabella Vitti and Katie Armstrong at Routledge for their editorial assistance in seeing this book through to publication. Lastly, I thank my family. My mother-in-law and father-in-law, Anita Splendore and Mike Frantz, were wonderfully supportive, and their genuine curiosity about my research has long meant a great deal to me (who else travels to Marfa, TX on the offhand suggestion of their son-in-law?). Sadly, Mike passed away not long before this book was published. I miss him dearly and so wish I could have seen him flip through these pages. During the early years of this project, I was extremely fortunate to live in the same city as my brother and sister-in-law, Jonathan and Miriam Levy, where I could often enjoy their warmth and good humor after a long day of writing. And though today our laughs are more often shared across a tablet screen, with children shrieking in the background, I cherish their company every bit as much now as then. My parents, Diane and Richard Levy, have taught me by their example the meaning of unconditional love and unwavering support. Their faith in me and my abilities means more than I can say. I reserve my final and most profound expression of gratitude to my wife, Anna Frantz, whose partnership has sustained me throughout the duration of this project. Its highs were more sweet for being shared with her, its lows more bearable. To our two sons, Elliott and Zachary, this book is, in part, about the importance of close looking, and no one has taught me to see the world with fresh eyes more than you. For the unceasing joy and wonder you bring me, I dedicate these pages to you. Portions of Chapter 3 were published as the essay “Specific Painting: David Novros, Donald Judd, and 101 Spring Street,” in the anthology In Terms of Painting, edited by Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2016), pp. 54–66. Portions of Chapter 4 will appear as the essay “Painting Reframed: Jo Baer in the 1960s,” in the proceedings from the conference “The Silence of Images,” which will be published by Edizioni Musei Vaticani, currently in press.

Introduction

Minimalism has been canonized as the movement that sounded painting’s death knell. The protagonists in this narrative were sculptors like Donald Judd and Robert Morris, who conceived their practices in direct opposition to a prevailing teleological understanding of painting advanced by such influential modernist critics as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. By the early sixties, the concept of medium specificity established in Greenberg’s early criticism, in which he claimed that the arts maintained their purity by being “hunted back to their mediums” and thereby “isolated, concentrated and defined,”1 had hardened into a prescriptive dogma associated with specific artists and artistic procedures and narrowly oriented towards the realization of an aesthetic of optical transcendence.2 To artists like Judd and Morris, the modernist position was a dead end. Their sculptures’ literal surfaces and bodily address advanced a hardboiled materialism that refused Greenberg and Fried’s ideal of an art that rendered matter “entirely optical” and addressed itself to “eyesight alone” (figs.  I.1, I.2).3 As the decade unfolded, conceptual and process-oriented practices emerged in dialogue with the Minimalists, frequently extending their habit of staking out artistic positions at painting’s expense.4 Art writers of the period mirrored this trend by developing historicizing critical models that confined painting to a selfreferential narrative with diminishing returns, while supposedly more progressive sculptural and conceptual practices flourished. The logical fulfillment of these critical tactics can be found in the endgame aesthetics of critics such as Douglas Crimp and Yve-Alain Bois, who, in distinct but related formulations, have offered historical and theoretical justification for the “death of painting.”5 Judd and Morris’s arguments rank among the most well-rehearsed in all of postwar art history. Nonetheless, their claims regarding painting are essential to much that follows and must be briefly recapitulated here. Judd’s understanding of painting was more complicated than is commonly reflected in the scholarly literature and will be the subject of substantial exegesis in Chapter Three. His best known and most influential comments on the medium are found in his classic piece of Minimalist polemic, “Specific Objects” of 1965. This text, a theoretically motivated survey of inter-medium hybridity in contemporary art, reflected the artist’s sophisticated, if heretical, understanding of Greenberg’s criticism. Though he does not cite it explicitly, Judd took as his point of departure the critic’s formulation of modernism’s teleology as outlined in his much discussed essay “Modernist Painting,” arguing that if painting evolved through the inexorable expurgation of conventions extraneous to the medium, as Greenberg claimed, then its logical endpoint was the literal surface of the picture plane. Consequently, objecthood was painting’s sine qua non: “The main

2

Introduction

Figure I.1 Installation view of a Donald Judd exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, between February 5 and March 2, 1966; Rudy Burckhardt, photographer. Leo Castelli Gallery records, circa 1880–2000, bulk 1957–99. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © 2018 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside it.”6 In comparison to what he saw as the virtually unlimited formal potential of three-dimensions, the possibilities for painting’s rectangular “container” were highly circumscribed, especially so given the mandates of modernist criticism. Judd’s prognosis for painting appeared to be grim: “The rectangular plane is given a life span.”7 In his reading, modernist painting foretold its own demise. “A painting isn’t an image,” he wrote—a pithy yet totalizing condemnation of the pictorial.8 Although Morris was more concerned with sculptural theory than anti-painting polemic, the first two installments of his “Notes on Sculpture” nonetheless had important implications for two-dimensional practices. The impetus for these essays was a desire to stake out sculpture’s native territory as distinct from painting. Like Judd, Morris was an attentive reader of Greenberg, but unlike Judd, he affirmed the critic’s understanding of painting as an exclusively optical medium so as to distinguish it from sculpture’s essential spatiality and tactility:

Introduction

3

Figure I.2 Robert Morris installation at the Green Gallery in New York, 1964; Rudy Burckhardt, photographer. Rudy Burckhardt papers, 1934–2015. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © 2018 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In the interest of differences it seems time that some of the distinctions sculpture has managed for itself be articulated. To begin in the broadest possible way it should be stated that the concerns of sculpture have for some time not only been distinct from but hostile to those of painting. . . . If painting has sought to approach the object, it has sought equally hard to dematerialize itself on the way. Clearer distinctions between sculpture’s essentially tactile nature and the optical sensibilities involved in painting need to be made.9 Drawing on the phenomenology of the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Morris described the viewer’s experience of sculpture as being fundamentally corporeal and durational. Whereas the unity of a successful painting could be perceived instantaneously, an appreciation of sculpture unfolded in time as the viewer circumambulated the work. For Morris, this mode of spectatorship forced an awareness of the space of exhibition, making the work’s meaning contingent on the viewer’s embodied perception of it: “The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.”10

4

Introduction

While the first two parts of “Notes on Sculpture” allowed for painting’s ongoing relevance (provided it retained an exclusively optical address), by the time Morris wrote the series’ third installment in 1967, he had a change of heart: The trouble with painting is not its inescapable illusionism per se. But this inherent illusionism brings with it a nonactual elusiveness or indeterminate allusiveness. The mode has become antique. Specifically, what is antique about it is the divisiveness of experience that marks on a flat surface elicit. . . . For a long while the duality of thing and allusion sustained itself under the force of the profuse organizational innovation within the work. But it has worn thin and its premises cease to convince. Duality of experience is not direct enough. That which has ambiguity built into it is not acceptable to an empirical and pragmatic outlook.11 Painting, for Morris, was now “antique.” Its optical “elusiveness” and semiological “allusiveness” created a virtual aesthetic register that his own sculptural practice patently refused. He had come to believe that his cultural moment demanded an “empirical and pragmatic outlook” that was inherently at odds with the “divisive” experience painting engendered. The polemics of Judd and Morris decisively shaped Minimalism’s historicization.12 To this day, the movement is most readily associated with the former’s non-allusive, literal materiality and the latter’s phenomenology. Despite their own history of mutual antagonism, these two artists set much of the intellectual agenda for advanced American artistic practices in the sixties, and their arguments reverberated throughout the period’s art, exhibitions, and criticism, not to mention the decades of art historical literature that would be written in their aftermath.13 The seminal status of Judd and Morris’s essays had dire consequences for painting of this period. Even Minimalism’s earliest, large scale exhibitions—Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum and Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both of 1966—considered sculpture and painting in isolation, suggesting to the public that the new reductive aesthetic had divergent, medium-specific manifestations that shared little in the way of a common dialogue. Subsequent exhibitions, such as the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art’s A Romantic Minimalism (fig. I.3) of the following year, lent credence to this idea, much to painting’s detriment. The ICA exhibition featured the work of eight painters14 and two sculptors (Carl Andre and Richard Van Buren, whom curator Stephen S. Prokopoff, however ill-advisedly, claimed as painters working in a floor-bound idiom in his catalogue essay).15 By once again isolating painting from sculpture, the exhibition implied that painterly Minimalism represented a romantic variant of a movement whose leading practitioners disavowed just such a sentiment.16 As the decade wore on, painting became increasingly marginalized in relation to other putatively more innovative artistic developments, such that by 1975, the editors of Artforum saw fit to devote a special issue to the medium’s obsolescence.17 The scholarly literature on Minimalism largely reflects this view of painting as a regressive, if not paradoxical, manifestation of the movement.18 For example, James Meyer’s landmark book, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, considers only one painter, Frank Stella, to be central to its historical development. Indeed, Meyer upholds Stella as representative of the medium’s changing fortunes in these years, at the exclusion of all other painters. The key episode in his account is the painter’s transition from his stripe paintings (fig. I.4) to his Irregular Polygons (fig. I.5), which

Introduction

5

Figure I.3 A Romantic Minimalism, installation view, September 3–October 11, 1967. Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.

debuted at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966. Whereas the earlier paintings—with their resolutely flat, monochrome surfaces that were entirely a function of the literal shape of the support—had been hugely influential to the literalism of sculptors such as Judd and Andre, the new work featured vibrant polychromy and perspectival illusionism. To many observers, the Irregular Polygons signaled Stella’s disavowal of the sculptors’ aesthetic materialism in favor of modernist opticality. Meyer considers this change of course to have had irrevocable consequences for painting more broadly: And what of painting? Stella’s defection seemed to have annulled the prospects of a minimal-type painting, a painting that could compete with the Primary Structure on its own terms. . . . The retreat of Stella from stripe painting at this juncture implied that the monochrome canvas was doomed. It suggested that the divide between the literalist aesthetic of Judd and Fried’s optical model was irresolvable, leaving no third way.19 Meyer accurately captures Stella’s pivotal status in painting’s discursive field at this time.20 The stripe paintings’ liminal position between the literal and optical made them a veritable battleground for the rival arguments of modernist critics and advocates of Minimalist sculpture. However, by extrapolating the consequences of Stella’s decision onto the practice of painting more broadly, he allows polemic to overshadow the reality on the ground. Meyer does admit that “[a]lthough the notion of something like a pictorial ‘minimalism’ seemed inherently contradictory, this did not, however, prevent

6

Introduction

Figure I.4 Frank Stella, Union Pacific, 1960, aluminum paint on canvas, 77 1/4 × 148 1/2 × 2 5/8 in. (196.2 × 377.2 × 6.7 cm). Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, 1976.62. © 2018 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

figures like Robert Ryman, Jo Baer, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, David Novros, and Paul Mogensen from taking this intermediate path nor writers like [Lucy] Lippard and [Lawrence] Alloway from describing it,”21 but his account makes this mode of painting appear fatally compromised by its conflicting impulses and thus out of step with the Minimalist mainstream. A similar tendency appears in Meyer’s brief discussion of Lawrence Alloway’s Systemic Painting exhibition, which will be discussed in greater depth in the following chapter. Summarizing its aspirations, he writes, The Guggenheim show attempted to define something like a minimal-type painting—a painting which, conceived as a counterpart to the minimal object, only received a definitive analysis during the seventies, after the heated debates around the minimal object had been played out.22 Here, too, Meyer privileges discourse over art, suggesting that the legibility of a “minimal-type painting” hinged on the (apparently delayed) emergence of a particular body of criticism, as if the artists’ own efforts at articulating such a painting were for naught in the absence of critical legitimization. Meyer’s assertion is all the more peculiar in light of its accompanying footnote, in which, after listing a few articles from the sixties pertaining to Mangold and Baer, he cites the “more sustained analysis of literalist painting” that emerged in the seventies—all of which is about the art of Robert Ryman.23 This would suggest that Meyer privileges one particular painter’s claims to literalism over and above those of the myriad painters active in this period—a tendency that, as will be seen, is not uncommon in discussions of Minimalist painting.

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7

Figure I.5 Frank Stella, Moultonville III, 1965–66, enamel on canvas, 88 × 123 in. (223.5 × 312.4 cm). Gift of the Friends of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. F67–13. © 2018 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Media Services/John Lamberton.

Painting thus remains a sizable lacuna in Meyer’s otherwise masterful account of Minimalism—one that this book seeks to redress. Indeed, in many respects, what follows takes his book as authoritative. I am indebted to his conception of Minimalism as “a field of difference . . . a strategic game with potential positions to be occupied.”  24 Given that many of these “positions” were developed in relation to specific understandings of painting, this book effectively expands upon Meyer’s differential field by illuminating the loci that three key painters—Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer—occupied within it. If the critical literature failed to take the measure of these artists, as Meyer suggests (though the following chapters will, to a degree, contest that assertion), their paintings nonetheless articulated important visual counterarguments that were central to Minimalism’s formative debates. While its critiques of painting are a familiar feature of Minimalism’s history, the ways in which they stimulated painterly strategies for resistance, adaptation, and revivification are less well understood. This dialogical quality of painterly production in the sixties is largely absent from the scholarly literature, which is generally comprised of monographic surveys (usually in the form of exhibition catalogues) that emphasize the inner logic of an oeuvre’s diachronic development over the synchronic effects of specific interventions within a defined artistic milieu.25

8

Introduction

Furthermore, although these painters generally did not share their sculptor peers’ proclivity for publishing manifesto-like statements, they have been far from silent. Indeed, a disproportionate amount of the literature on these artists consists of interviews, in which they have cogently elucidated their positions in and contributions to Minimalism’s discourses. This preponderance of interviews has resulted in a significant body of evidence that has received scant critical attention. The rationale behind the selection of Mangold, Novros, and Baer warrants some discussion. If judged by market recognition, they are perhaps not the three painters most readily associated with Minimalism. One might reasonably question the omission of more familiar names like Stella, Ryman, Agnes Martin, and Brice Marden. While all of those painters have been linked to Minimalism, I contend that Mangold, Novros, and Baer’s works from the sixties constitute the most substantive and sustained painterly engagements with the issues that have come to define the movement. All three saw the imperiled “third way” Meyer describes as offering a viable path for an artistic practice in which painting could exist as both image and object. Mangold’s deliberations on painting’s ontology evolved concurrently with and in response to those of Judd and Morris, and his conclusions represent an important counterpoint to the sculptors’, asserting the medium’s claims to a literalist materiality and phenomenology without relinquishing its optical engagements. Furthermore, his close personal and artistic association with Sol LeWitt is reflected in a body of work produced in the mid-sixties that deployed serial and conceptual strategies commonly deemed anathema to painting. Novros has cited Judd’s criticism as a major influence on his early paintings, and the sculptor would later commission a fresco from him for his SoHo residence. These exchanges are remarkable given Judd’s current status as one of Minimalism’s leading anti-painting polemicists, making Novros an illuminating interlocutor who forces a reappraisal of Judd’s position regarding the medium. Baer enjoyed close relationships with several of the Minimalist sculptors, such as Judd, Mel Bochner, and Dan Flavin, and she showed in many of the movement’s most important group exhibitions, in which her work was widely understood to occupy shared aesthetic ground with her object-making peers. She also overtly engaged these artists’ critiques of painting with her 1967 Artforum letter to the editor, which stands as the period’s most forceful rebuttal to Judd and Morris’s critiques. In comparison to these three painters, Martin, Ryman, and Marden occupied a more oblique position in relation to the Minimalist field, while Stella effectively announced his defection from it with the Irregular Polygons. Christina Bryan Rosenberger has definitively demonstrated that Martin’s artistic formation occurred primarily in New Mexico in the late forties and fifties, prior to her arrival in New York in 1957 and well before she began showing in Minimalist exhibitions.26 Her work emerged in dialogue with artists such as Edward Corbett, Beatrice Mandelman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ad Reinhardt, Clay Spohn, and Adja Yunkers, rather than with the likes of Stella, Judd, or Andre.27 The origins of Ryman’s practice also predate Minimalism’s earliest manifestations by a considerable margin,28 and his reception largely postdates its denouement, aligning more closely with the emergence of process-oriented practices from later in the sixties.29 Marden’s monochrome paintings likewise evinced what Morris would describe in 1970 as “the phenomenology of making.”30 Their subtly variegated, waxen surfaces and exposed bottom margins of splattered raw canvas thematize painting’s tactility and viscosity in a manner that is markedly distinct from Mangold, Novros, and Baer’s use of a flat, uniform facture that foregrounds the object status of the medium’s physical support.

Introduction

9

While on the subject of inclusions and exclusions, it should also be noted that the history told in these pages is geographically circumscribed, in that it primarily focuses on the social, professional, and institutional milieus of New York City. The intention here is not to perpetuate an outmoded East Coast bias that denies the vitality of West Coast Minimalism, which, it should be noted, experienced a related exodus from painting to sculpture. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that Minimalism’s differential field was not just defined discursively but also geographically. This book thus focuses on the painters active in the artistic center in which the debates surrounding painting’s viability reached their most fevered pitch.31 My aim in drawing these distinctions is not necessarily to privilege certain painters’ Minimalist credentials over others’. Indeed, given Meyer’s elucidation of Minimalism’s essential heterogeneity, I wholly admit the term’s limited purchase on the art that has been ascribed to it. However, if Minimalism now signifies an arena of debate rather than a monolithic movement, then these painters are critical to its history, as their work demonstrates that painting served not only as an object of its critiques but as a crucible for its most fiercely contested subjects. A central contention of this book is that reintroducing painting to the Minimalist field impels a reappraisal of its history more broadly. To that end, I maintain that Mangold, Novros, and Baer are the painters that most substantively reshape our understanding of its canonical configuration and challenge its prevailing historicization in critical models that engage the art of the present. This volume is composed of an exhibition case study, followed by three monographic chapters and a conclusion. Taking its cue from the opening discussion of Primary Structures in Meyer’s book, Chapter 1 examines that exhibition’s painterly analogue, Alloway’s Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim. Mangold, Novros, and Baer all participated in this show, making it a valuable barometer with which to gauge painting’s shifting critical fortunes at mid-decade. The chapter recreates the show’s path through the museum’s rotunda, setting the visitor’s experience against both Alloway’s catalogue essay and the wildly varied critical response. Systemic Painting revealed a medium at a crossroads. While it did find some sympathetic viewers, critics weaned on Abstract Expressionism barely recognized the work on view as art, while those invested in emerging sculptural trends saw the final gasps of a dying modernist tradition. Chapter 2 focuses on Robert Mangold’s Walls and Areas, two related bodies of work he exhibited at his breakthrough show at Fischbach Gallery in 1965. With these paintings, Mangold aspired to a dialectical synthesis of the literalist and modernist positions. With their architectural silhouettes and lumberyard materiality, the Walls broached the sculptural mode of relief while retaining painting’s native optical engagements. The Areas’ subtle atmospherics at once acknowledged painting’s capacity for illusionism and negated it through their conspicuous shape and banal, industrial palette. The chapter also analyzes Mangold’s recently published 1967 essay, “Flat Art,” a significant yet underappreciated piece of Minimalist polemic that argues for painting’s continued viability in the face of recent attacks. This essay also finds Mangold contemplating the implications of LeWitt’s recent serial works, allowing for a close examination of the artistic exchanges that transpired between them in 1965–66, pivotal years in both their practices. The chapter concludes with a close reading of the critical response to the Fischbach exhibition, with a particular emphasis on the writing of Lucy Lippard, the critic most committed to defending painting’s analogue to the Minimalist object. Chapter 3 discusses the early career of David Novros, a figure who has largely fallen out of the dominant art historical narratives of the sixties but was arguably

10

Introduction

the most critically admired of the three painters under consideration here. It takes seriously his claims regarding the influence of Judd’s criticism on his early work, rereading the sculptor’s writings to draw out a more nuanced understanding of his position on painting than is often allowed. Judd never claimed that the specific object definitively spelled painting’s demise. In fact, he envisioned a future for the medium, albeit one that responded to the challenges of recent literalist art. Novros’s fresco at Judd’s Spring St. residence represents one such path forward, as it achieved the unity of color and support that he prized. Furthermore, fresco’s site-specificity and material fixity conformed with Judd’s ambitions for the permanent installation of works that circumvented the art market’s networks of exchange—a concept that likewise motivated Novros’s muralist practice in the years that followed. Chapter 4 considers Jo Baer’s framing band paintings of the mid-sixties. Whereas these works have most frequently been discussed in relation to her interest in optical science, this chapter takes as its point of departure Baer’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable, which she has credited with their inspiration. Like Beckett’s novel, which thematizes a post-Cartesian model of destabilized subjectivity, Baer’s paintings create an elusive, fluid aesthetic encounter that denies the apperceptive self its moorings. The chapter compares her paintings to the two painterly conventions they invoke, the Albertian window and the Friedian deductive structure, both of which are predicated on a metaphysic of viewer self-presence that Baer’s work subverts. The chapter then considers the gender implications of her refusal of the modernist paradigm. Whereas modernist critics described the total optical disclosure of the work by an artist like Kenneth Noland using a masculinist rhetoric of heroic genius and control, Baer’s enigmatic color frustrated the modernist hegemony by asserting an embodied aesthetic experience that resisted facile gender coding. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Baer’s 1967 Artforum letter, a missive that effectively severed her ties with her sculptor peers, foreshadowing her disavowal of her own Minimalist idiom and abandonment of the New York art world in 1975. The Conclusion examines the endgame aesthetic arguments of Yve-Alain Bois and Douglas Crimp, both of which draw significantly on the Minimalists’ critiques of painting. Both Bois and Crimp uphold Robert Ryman as the paradigmatic Minimalist painter, describing his work as illustrative of the medium’s imminent (Bois) or complete (Crimp) exhaustion. Ryman’s more recent commentators (and Ryman himself) have refuted this interpretation of his work, seeing it instead as an ongoing investigation into painting’s ever expanding possibilities. The work of Mangold, Novros, and Baer similarly resists these endgame scenarios, and they continue to complicate the critical models that have been applied to painting more recently in exhibitions such as 2016’s Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age. Their work argues not only for the medium’s significance to the historical study of Minimalism but also for its ongoing engagement with a broad range of cultural issues all too often occluded by art history’s perpetuation of the insular and inwardly directed discourses of painting.

Notes 1. Clement Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoon,” reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 32. 2. The key texts here are Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” “Louis and Noland,” and “After Abstract Expressionism,” all reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4:

Introduction

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

11

Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85–93, 93–100, 121–34. Clement Greenberg, “Sculpture in Our Time,” reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 59–60. Thierry de Duve has similarly described advanced artistic practices subsequent to Minimalism as a sequence of reactions against painting. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 205. Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” reprinted in On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 84–107 and Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” reprinted in Painting as Model (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 229–44. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” reprinted in Complete Writings 1959–1975: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1975), 182. Ibid., 184. Ibid. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (1968; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 223. As James Meyer notes, Morris redressed what he considered to be a contradiction in Greenberg’s theory of sculpture, which understood the medium in optical terms similar to those applied to painting—a clear violation of the critic’s proscriptions regarding medium specificity. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 155. Greenberg himself was aware of this inconsistency but was willing to overlook it, writing in “Sculpture in Our Time,” “Here the prohibition against one art’s entering the domain of another is suspended.” Greenberg, “Sculpture in Our Time,” 59. Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” 232. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and Non Sequiturs,” reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 25–6. As James Meyer has noted, Michael Fried’s conflation of their positions in his essay, “Art and Objecthood” [reprinted in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–72] has played an outsize role in shaping this historicization. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 229–43. For more on Judd and Morris’s rivalry, see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 154, 267. The painters featured in the exhibition were Peter Gourfain, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Paul Mogensen, David Novros, and Robert Ryman. “Thus, in addition to those works retaining a familiar two-dimensional, painting format, the less orthodox structures shown in the exhibition are also, generically, painting related to the wall (or floor) surface.” Stephen S. Prokopoff, A Romantic Minimalism, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Institute of Contemporary Art, 1967), unpaginated. Prokopoff’s catalogue essay makes plain his reactionary interpretation of this work, which he describes as evincing a form of “personalism, the fostering of a distinctly individual nuance and mood” that was “intimate, oriented toward an individual sensuousness.” Ibid. Ironically, Lucy Lipard, a staunch advocate for many of these painting practices, coined the term “Romantic Minimalism” in relation to painting in her review of a group exhibition at Bykert Gallery in 1967. Lucy R. Lippard, “Rebelliously Romantic?,” New York Times, June 4, 1967, 25. Prokopoff credits Lippard with the term in his essay. The issue begins with a questionnaire submitted to painters prefaced with the statement, “[T]hose understood to be making ‘the next inevitable step’ now work with any material but paint.” “Painters Reply,” Artforum 14, no. 1 (September 1975): 26. For a historiographical analysis of painting’s status within the scholarly literature surveying Minimalism, see Hélène Trespeuch, “Is There Such a Thing as Minimalist Painting? A Historiographical Study,” in Terms of Painting, ed. Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2016), 43–53. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 126. Writing at a slight remove from this turning point, Philip Leider similarly described Stella’s practice as a bellwether for other contemporary artists: “For it is precisely Stella’s

12

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

Introduction ambivalence about the literalist implications of his own paintings that is fundamental to what he is all about. It is why every move he makes is followed with such intense interest by other artists; his own love-hate relationship with literalism is an issue which arises in their studios everyday . . . His shows just get looked at with harder eyes and tougher minds, because, for almost everyone, taking Stella’s measure is more important, somehow than taking anyone else’s.” Philip Leider, “Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella’s Retrospective at the Modern,” Artforum 8, no. 8 (April 1970): 47. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 126. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 298, note 74. Ibid., 4. There have, of course, been exceptions. The 2004 exhibition, “A Minimal Future?: Art as Object, 1958–1968” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art was admirable in its inclusivity, featuring the work of all three painters discussed here and others. However, none of its catalogue essays—each of which addressed a key aspect of Minimalist practice—focused on painting. Ann Goldstein and Diedrich Diederichsen, eds., A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004). Frances Colpitt’s monographic study also discusses a number of painters, but her conception of Minimalism as a more or less cohesive movement evincing a defined set of formal principles does not adequately account for its fiercely polemical nature or for the contested position painting occupied with in it. Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990). Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). Ibid., 7. Martin herself disavowed her association with Minimalism, professing her allegiance to an earlier generation of artists. Of her inclusion in 10 at the Dwan Gallery in 1966, a canonical Minimalist exhibition, she said, “They asked me to show with them, and I was flattered. They were all so young. I considered myself to be an Abstract Expressionist, but they considered me to be a Minimalist. I couldn’t do anything about that.” Quoted in Ibid., 166. Ryman began what he describes as is first mature painting in 1955. Robert Storr, Robert Ryman, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993), 48. Ryman had only one American solo exhibition between 1963–68. In the Systemic Painting catalogue, he is one of only two artists who do not have any exhibition history or bibliography, further suggesting that his critical moment had not yet arrived. Lynn Zelevansky, “Chronology,” in Robert Ryman, 215. The Ryman bibliography swells after 1969, when his work appeared in such landmark exhibitions as the Whitney’s “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” and the London Institute of Contemporary Art’s “When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information.” For more on Ryman’s uneasy fit within the discourses of Minimalism, see Vittorio Colaizzi, Robert Ryman (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2017), 137–50. Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” reprinted in Continuous Objects Altered Daily, 71–94. Though as James Meyer has argued, artistic dialogue between the coasts was a vital part of Minimalism’s history. James Meyer, “Another Minimalism,” in A Minimal Future?, 33–49.

1

Systemic Painting A Medium at a Crossroads

“A Current American Tendency” On June 16, 1964, Lawrence Alloway, curator of contemporary art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, drafted an ambitious proposal for a “mixed exhibition” showcasing “a current American tendency . . . un-christened at present, but recognizably present as an emerging and rather wide-spread force.”1 Alloway’s characterization of his show as “mixed” was an understatement, as indicated by his list of the types of work he sought to bring under one roof: 1. The shaped canvas (the tondo, zig-zag stretchers, canvases with central openings, etc.) 2. The multiple canvas (more than one canvas used within the limits of a single work; canvases added to one another in a row) 3. One-image paintings (artists who repeat identical or very similar images from one work to another, with color change, or other small variations) 4. Objects in color (constructions in three dimensions, conceived in terms of color: quite unlike found objects)2 These categories describe a number of disparate art forms circulating in New York in the sixties: the “deductive” paintings of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland; the modular canvases of painters such as Robert Mangold and David Novros; the “specific objects” of Donald Judd; and the various types of hard-edge abstraction adopted by such painters as Paul Feeley, Al Held, and Edwin Ruda, to name but a few. These diverse practices, while generally partaking in the collective dialogue that was the New York art world of the sixties, are now understood to be marked by essential differences—hardly representative of a singular “tendency.” However, at the time of Alloway’s writing, the entrenched polemics that would come to define this period were in their infancy. As James Meyer has written, the early sixties were a “heterodox situation,” in which artistic practices that would later come to be understood as mutually antagonistic could, for the time being, share gallery space,3 an assessment encapsulated by Larry Poons’s recollection: “For a few moments, everything existed on the same walls, and it was fine.”4 To Alloway in 1964, his proposal’s diverse list of artistic practices embodied nothing less than the next chapter in American abstraction.5 These artists were “opposed to abstract expressionism,” had “a great concern with systematic imagery,” and were “looking for ways to separate painting from the traditional organization of space.”6

14 Systemic Painting They dispensed with expressive gesture and existential drama in favor of a cool, reductive aesthetic, and in this respect, they were undeniably different from the New York School painters of the fifties and (more importantly) their much derided imitators— the practitioners of the De Kooning-esque “Tenth Street Touch.” Furthermore, in a pointed rebuke to Greenberg, Alloway implied that the new art blurred the boundaries between mediums. The object-like shaped canvases and constructions in color identified in his proposal suggested a convergence of painting and sculpture, in which the arts were no longer restricted to their native competencies but rather had grown increasingly familiar with one another. While Alloway’s proposal stopped short of declaring the state of medium hybridity that Judd would later theorize in “Specific Objects,” he does claim a degree of promiscuity between the mediums, suggesting that painting was anything but walled off from sculpture at this time. Much changed in the art world between the date of Alloway’s initial proposal and its eventual realization as Systemic Painting in September 1966 (figs. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3). By that winter, he had spun off the concept of the “shaped canvas” into its own eponymous exhibition.7 Two months prior to Alloway’s proposal, Clement Greenberg’s exhibition, Post-Painterly Abstraction, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had made its own attempt to define the zeitgeist of advanced American art, and

Figure 1.1 Installation view: Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Photograph by Robert E. Mates. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Systemic Painting

15

Figure 1.2 Installation view: Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Photograph by Robert E. Mates. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

together with Michael Fried’s Three American Painters at the Fogg Art Museum of the following spring, these group shows had introduced powerful new arguments into the field of modernist criticism. Alloway also had to contend with the Museum of Modern Art’s immensely popular The Responsive Eye of the spring of 1965, of which he had been harshly critical. In a public lecture at the Guggenheim, he described the exhibition as a superficial “inventory for an optical kick” and admonished its curator, William Seitz, for his limited grasp of the art of the present, suggesting that he had “turned a part of the current scene in abstract art into the whole.”8 Nonetheless, Alloway did modify the parameters of his exhibition in response to the MoMA show. Whereas an updated exhibition proposal of November 1965 listed Op art as one of its major categories, the only artists in the final checklist who could be said to fall into that camp were Larry Poons, Nicholas Krushenick, and Will Insley.9 The Jewish Museum’s Primary Structures exhibition, whose origins dated to roughly the same time as Alloway’s proposal,10 also obviated the sculptural component of his initial concept, a development he acknowledged in the endnotes to his catalogue essay: “When the present exhibition was proposed originally in June 1964 it was intended to show painting and sculpture, but Primary Structures covered the

16 Systemic Painting

Figure 1.3 Installation view: Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Photograph by Robert E. Mates. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

ground too closely to repeat it.”11 He lamented the schism the two exhibitions created between the mediums, as it obscured what he observed to be a robust dialogue then occurring between painting and sculpture, most notably in the work of Stella and Judd. In the same note, he wrote “The reasons for planning to show flat and 3D work are (1) analogies between work in both media and (2) the number of artists who combine the technology of one with the formal characteristics of the other.”12 Primary Structures and Systemic Painting opened within five months of one another, and together, they announced the arrival of the new reductive aesthetic in sculpture and painting respectively. However, if this aesthetic was manifest in both two and three dimensions, these exhibitions also suggested that essential differences nonetheless existed between them on the basis of medium. Although not as well remembered today in comparison to these other major group exhibitions of the mid-sixties, Systemic Painting merits reexamination for the myriad ways in which it crystallized painting’s contested status at mid-decade. From its supporting polemic in Alloway’s catalogue essay, to its installation, to its critical reception, Systemic Painting revealed a medium at a crossroads. The waning of Abstract Expressionism, emergent discourses pertaining to painting’s opticality and objecthood, as

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well as a growing cynicism about New York’s burgeoning art market, all factored into this exhibition’s fractious reception. If Alloway believed his exhibition heralded abstract painting’s latest achievement, it ultimately proved more effective at highlighting the competing pressures the medium faced, thus setting the stage for painting’s increasing marginalization as the decade unfolded.

“Systemic” Defined Nowhere were the strains confronting Alloway’s project more evident than in his catalogue essay. If abstraction’s discursive field had grown more complicated in the two years between Systemic Painting’s inception and realization, Alloway and the Guggenheim remained undaunted in their sense of purpose. In his preface, Director Thomas M. Messer confidently stated that his curator had “isolate[d] a recognizable visual phenomenon and . . . pursue[d] in the subsequent catalogue pages, its specific meaning.”13 Alloway further insisted on the novelty of his curatorial conceit in a supplemental essay, “Background to Systemic,” published in ARTnews, which opened by claiming that recent commentary on abstract painting was “inconclusive” and “only occasionally, momentarily . . . about the painting.”14 Alloway felt that his exhibition was an opportunity to take stock and clear the air: “At the moment, maybe what is needed is a short-term art history, one not concerned with the major movements of style, not distracted by cultural melodramas of modern sensibility, but with close-up data.”15 He admitted that the term “Systemic Painting” was yet another addition to a string of recent attempts to classify the new aesthetic, which had already been referred to as “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” “Cool-Art,” and “ABC art.”16 However, where previous labels fell short, he believed his had traction due to it descriptive acuity and its openness to meanings foreclosed by formalist criticism. If Alloway’s stated goal was to supersede existing critical models, he nonetheless had to acknowledge the significance of Clement Greenberg to any reckoning with the contemporary scene. In “Background to Systemic,” after discussing recent exhibitions of abstract painting, he conceded that “critical and public interest in the early 60’s had left Abstract Expressionism, and the main area of abstract art on which it now concentrated can be identified with Clement Greenberg’s aesthetics.”17 Greenberg had played a vital role in facilitating Alloway’s introduction to the New York art world during his first visit to the United States from London in 1958, and his writing reflects a thorough grasp of the American critic’s corpus.18 Systemic Painting’s checklist tacitly admitted Greenberg’s importance—8 of its 28 artists had also shown in Post-Painterly Abstraction.19 The catalogue essay also internalized Fried’s recent elaborations of Greenbergian concepts, as when it speaks of a “de-gesturized” Pollock whose looping skeins of paint “have condensed into unitary fields of color”20—a characterization that echoes Fried’s discussion of the drip paintings’ opticality in “Three American Painters.”21 While Alloway’s debts to Greenberg and Fried were plainly evident, he believed that Systemic Painting’s eschewal of formalism enabled it to articulate more accurately and sensitively the true nature of the most advanced contemporary abstraction. “There is a ceiling to Greenberg’s [a]esthetic which must be faced,” he wrote in his catalogue essay. “What is missing from the formalist approach to painting is a serious desire to study meanings beyond the purely visual configuration.”22 For example, he faulted “Post-Painterly Abstraction’s” “descriptive usefulness” for failing

18 Systemic Painting to distinguish “un-systemic” artists, such as Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler, from their purportedly systemic colleagues, such as Feeley, Ellsworth Kelly, Noland, Poons, and Stella.23 Additionally, he accused Greenberg of practicing an invidious, prescriptive historicism, wherein he claimed to recognize art history’s most recent “cyclic form from within one of the cycles.”24 Alloway set such a project in contradistinction to his more empirical and retrospective practice of “short-term art history” that was more concerned with accounting for the recent past than with historical forecasting.25 Systemic Painting’s real achievement, Alloway argued, lay in its receptiveness to meanings that exceeded Greenberg’s formalist paradigm. For Alloway, these meanings derived from the serial nature of systemic work, which he defined as follows: “Hence systemic, meaning: ‘arranged or conducted according to a system, plan or organized method.’”26 Noting that most of the artists in the exhibition “work in runs, groups, or periods,” he argued that their individual works—rather than being semiologically and aesthetically autonomous—functioned syntactically, producing meaning diachronically over the life of a series: “Possibly . . . the evasiveness about meaning in Noland . . . may have to do with the expectation that a meaning is complete in each single painting rather than located over a run or a set.”27 While Alloway did not identify precisely what new meanings might be gleaned from a Noland series that could not from an individual canvas, Systemic Painting’s premise was that such meanings nonetheless existed. Ironically, it would have been impossible for the exhibition to impart these additional meanings to its viewers, as each artist was represented by a single painting. Courtney J. Martin and Nigel Whiteley have described Alloway’s notion of the ‘systemic’ as a pseudoscientific application of systems theory that enjoyed widespread, mainstream appeal in a variety of cultural and intellectual discourses in the United States in the sixties.28 As defined by its chief popularizer, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a system was a “set of elements standing in interrelation among themselves and with the environment.”29 Systems theory promised to find holistic order and interconnectivity where the senses yielded an impression of disparateness and fragmentation. Though he does not cite a specific systems theorist (or even use the words “systems theory”) in either of the two essays he wrote for the exhibition, Alloway had a longstanding interest in the intersection of science and culture and would have had at least a passing familiarity with the term’s more popular applications.30 Invoking systems theory in his exhibition, if only obliquely and superficially, must have been appealing to Alloway in his turn to a larger set of data—the series—to elucidate levels of meaning precluded by Greenbergian formalism. The other key influence in Alloway’s conception of Systemic Painting was the art of Barnett Newman. He had curated the artist’s first museum exhibition, The Stations of the Cross, lema sabachthani, which immediately preceded Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim, and the two shows’ gestation periods coincided, with both first being proposed in 1964. The exhibition constituted Newman’s first serial work: 14 blackand-white paintings—one for each Station of the Passion of Christ—each containing two variations of the artist’s signature “Zip.” Where the artist’s earlier paintings focused the viewer’s attention on the aesthetic singularity of the individual Zip, the Stations’ play of difference and repetition invited contemplation of relationships that spanned multiple canvases.31 To many observers, and indeed to Newman himself, the Stations positioned the artist as a bridge between artistic generations. By adopting

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seriality, he reformulated his practice to incorporate a key strategy being deployed by respected younger colleagues.32 In his catalogue essay for the two exhibitions, Alloway identified Newman as the leading precursor to contemporary painters’ systemic tendencies. Of the Stations, he wrote, “[T]he series as a whole is, for all its impression of austerity, constitutes [sic] a highly nuanced system,” and in Systemic Painting, he more explicitly acknowledged his exhibition’s debts to Newman’s work: “Although this idea [the systemic] is not central to the paintings of Newman, it is indicative of his continuous presence on the scene in the 60’s that a proposed [a]esthetic should rest, at least partially, on his work.”33 Newman also lent art historical gravitas to Alloway’s ambitions for Systemic Painting. Organizing the first museum exhibition for a firstgeneration New York School titan such as Newman gave Alloway, a novice curator working on foreign soil, the requisite bona fides to issue grand pronouncements on the status of contemporary American art, establishing him as a thought leader on the order of Greenberg and Fried.34 By making the series the defining characteristic of Systemic Painting, Alloway waded into turbulent waters. The artistic series and seriality were fiercely contested topics in the art world of the sixties, and while Alloway’s was one of the less persuasive contributions to these debates, his essay does reflect an awareness of the critical discourse to that point.35 As Sarah K. Rich has observed, Alloway’s notion of the systemic was indebted to Fried’s description of the modernist series in Three American Painters.36 In this essay, Fried ascribed a didactic function to the series: Finally, it is worth remarking on the importance for modernist painters of thinking and working in terms of series of paintings . . . which has come increasingly to have the function of providing a context of mutual elucidation for the individual paintings comprising a given series. . . . The series, then, has become one of modernist painting’s chief defenses against the risk of misinterpretation.37 While Fried would insist that the hermeneutic safeguards the series provided did not compromise the autonomy of the individual modernist painting, Alloway hypothesized that it was precisely this act of “mutual elucidation” that transposed meaning away from the singular painting and out onto a diachronic, serial progression.38 If Alloway’s conception of serial art’s function was indebted to Fried, his understanding of its meaning, ironically enough, derived from the antipodal critical paradigm of Harold Rosenberg. Anticipating the much-lodged complaint that the new reductive art was cold or impersonal, Alloway couched it in the familiar rhetoric of Action painting—a concession, surely, to an audience acculturated to Abstract Expressionism: A system is as human as a splash of paint, more so when the splash gets routinized. . . . The personal is not expunged by using a neat technique; anonymity is not a consequence of highly finishing a painting. The artist’s conceptual order is just as personal as autographic tracks.39 Given the devaluation of the gestural mark by the practitioners of the “Tenth Street Touch,” Alloway argued that authentic humanist content could now be found in the new reductive art. Where Rosenberg’s Action painter registered a sequence of existential choices within the “arena” of the single picture,40 the Systemic Painter’s version of

20 Systemic Painting this drama unfolded “further along, deeper in the process,” with measured statements made across multiple works.41 Again, Newman was the key figure in Alloway’s bridging of the art of the fifties and sixties. In his catalogue essay for the Stations, he related the deliberations made by Pollock in creating a single painting to those undergone by Newman across his series: It became a project, a speculative extension into the future, demanding paintings for its realization. This method of learning from the initial staged work is parallel to the kind of responsiveness that Jackson Pollock revealed in single paintings. He would make a mark and then develop or oppose it by other marks until he reached a point at which he had exhausted the work’s cues to him to act further. Newman has demonstrated the possibility of such awareness operating not in terms of visual judgment and touch within one painting, but as a source of structure for a series.42 Alloway’s insistence on the personal content of Systemic Painting was noticeably at odds with the literalist attitudes of many of its artists—a discrepancy laid bare in the catalogue’s artist statements. Jo Baer described the calculations and quantitative parameters that establish the limits of her series.43 Robert Mangold detailed the specific qualities of his medium and materials in dry, non-allusive prose.44 Tadaaki Kukayama flatly denied the presence of any humanist content in his work, saying only, “Ideas, thoughts, philosophy, reasons, meanings, even the humanity of the artist, do not enter my work at all. There is only the art itself. That is all.”45 For many of these artists, Stella’s famous quip, “What you see is what you see,” was a veritable professional credo.46 Alloway was certainly cognizant of these literalist tendencies and of the increasingly pervasive discussions of painting’s objecthood. He attempted to adjudicate this conflict by arguing that working in series could imbue literalism with additional layers of signification, stating, “When a work of art is defined as an object we clearly stress its materiality and factualness, but its repetition, on this basis, returns meaning to the syntax.”47 Expression, according to Alloway, thus entered Systemic Painting through the back door, often against the objections of the artists themselves. Alloway’s argument also faltered under the staggering variety of practices he imputed to the “systemic”: “shaped canvases, multiple canvases, modular paintings, and One Image painting.”48 What is significant about this list is that the “systemic” conflates “modular” or serial works with those that adhered to the more traditional practice of the modernist series. For many artists of the sixties, this was a vital distinction, as the former was grounds for a non-expressive, literalist practice, whereas the latter remained tied to more conventional notions of authorial invention. Mel Bochner, for example, began his 1967 article, “The Serial Attitude,” by clearly differentiating the serial from the series, writing, “Many artists work ‘in series.’ That is, they make different versions of a basic theme. . . . This falls outside the area of concern here.”49 However, for Alloway in 1966, the arrangement of modular units within an individual work was effectively indistinguishable from the repeated use of a single formal configuration across multiple works. He was not alone in his confusion on this point. The curator Maurice Tuchman, evidently persuaded by Alloway’s formulation of the “systemic,” later invited him to apply it to sculpture in a catalogue essay for the

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Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s survey, American Sculpture of the Sixties. In this essay, entitled “Serial Forms,” Alloway made explicit the elisions his understanding of the serial subtended: Serial, then, can be used to refer to the internal parts of a work when they are seen in uninterrupted succession.  .  . . Other artists who do not keep to repetitive identical forms in single works can be considered as serial in another respect. This is when one form is common to a series of distinct but related works.51 Such a characterization would have surely rankled advocates of Minimalist sculpture such as Bochner, but when applied to Systemic Painting it passed unnoticed even by some of the most informed observers, perhaps due to the medium’s longstanding connection to the modernist series.

The Installation In his Systemic Painting essays, Alloway formulated an amalgamated polemic that aspired to an impossible synthesis. Ever the pluralist, he attempted to yoke literalism, seriality, Greenbergian modernism, and the specter of Action painting under a common curatorial rubric, and the failings of its supporting argument largely stemmed from his efforts to reconcile discourses that had defined themselves in opposition to one another. However, the plurality of critical discourses Alloway brought to bear in his essays paled in comparison to that of the art in his exhibition. Systemic Painting’s linear installation down the Guggenheim’s spiral permits a partial reconstruction of his curatorial logic in organizing the show, revealing a broad cross-section of the abstract painting practices circulating in New York at mid-decade. Most of the works privileged clean execution over demonstrations of painterly touch, though there were exceptions to even this basic common thread, such as the rote gesturalism of Robert Ryman and the muscular facture of Al Held. While the sequencing of the paintings echoed the rhetorical thrust of his essay to a degree, the sheer diversity of the work on view exceeded the confines of even Alloway’s commodious conceptual framework. Though several groupings displayed an immediate formal logic or reflected points made in his essay, these were punctuated with numerous outliers that tested the limits of the exhibition’s premise.52 Paintings by Robert Huot, Jack Youngerman, and Held (fig. 1.4) opened the exhibition with a sequence of bold, hard-edged abstractions. In his essay, Alloway cited Held and Youngerman as two artists who took a “freer,” more expressive approach to “wholistic [sic]” compositions that featured a “reduced number of colors.”53 They shared the first bay at the top of the Guggenheim’s spiral, and Alloway presumably likened their work to the two-toned palette and dynamic geometry of Huot’s Acrelin (1965), which occupied a neighboring wall. Dean Fleming’s 2V Dwan 2 and Larry Zox’s Teton II (Scissor’s Jack Series) hung in adjacent bays to form a slightly different comparison. Both intimated perspectival space through arrangements of rhomboid fields within rectangular formats. The precedent of Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons loomed over both of these artists; as will be discussed, the question of Stella’s influence would be crucial to Systemic Painting’s critical reception.

22 Systemic Painting

Figure 1.4 Al Held (1928–2005), The Big N, 1964, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 9 ft. 3/8 in. × 9 ft. (275.2 × 274.3 cm). Mrs. Armand P. Bartos Fund, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2018 Al Held Foundation, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Bay 6 featured what Alloway termed “paintings based on modules,” exemplified in his catalogue essay by the work of Peter Gourfain and Will Insley.54 This was a tenuous pairing. The compact rows of uniformly repeated vertical bars in Gourfain’s Whale-Road (1966) derived from Stella’s and Reinhardt’s black paintings, while the centripetally structured checkerboard-like configuration of Insley’s Wall at Dawn (1963, fig. 1.5) conveyed an optical dynamism, like a less vertiginous Bridget Riley. Other clusters of work made for more compelling comparisons. Ralph Humphrey’s Three Lines, I (1966), Robert Ryman’s Allied (1966), and Agnes Martin’s The City (1966) shared a bay, each attempting a mechanization of the hand to produce repeated linear configurations in paint or pencil. Tadaaki Kuwayama and Robert Mangold also revealed mutual sympathies in their shared bay, with each artist employing a diptych format and an impersonal application of sprayed paint with a near-monochrome palette. Systemic Painting extended off the ramp into the High Gallery, where it ceded ground to Greenberg and Fried’s example. Here one found works by Stella, Noland, and Poons—all of whom figured prominently into their criticism. Paul Feeley, who taught at Bennington College, where many in Greenberg’s coterie held teaching

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Figure 1.5 Will F. Insley (American, 1929–2011), Wall at Dawn, 1963–64, acrylic on masonite, 103 1/8 × 103 1/8 in. (261.9 × 261.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 68.212. Estate of Will Insley © Westwood Gallery NYC.

appointments, and Thomas Downing, a prominent Washington D.C. “Color Painter” (both of whom had also exhibited in “Post-Painterly Abstraction”), also had works in this gallery. Neil Williams’ Sartorial Habits of Billy Bo (1966, fig. 1.6) shared a wall with Stella’s Irregular Polygon, Wolfeboro, 4 (1966)—the former evidently inspired by the latter’s perspectival tensions between literal and depicted shape. In fact, of the seven painters in this gallery, only David Lee had no obvious connection to Greenberg and Fried. Yet, if this gallery made a concession to Greenberg’s camp, Alloway also managed to keep the critic’s influence at arm’s length, relegating these painters to a cul-de-sac off of the ramp’s linear progression. Though much of Systemic Painting’s installation mirrored the contents of Alloway’s essay, the numerous outliers that escaped his didactic clusters revealed the exhibition to be a decidedly heterogeneous affair. Ellsworth Kelly’s appropriation of the color spectrum, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red (1966), was sandwiched between Held and Youngerman’s Hard Edge expressionism and the Stella-esque perspectival play of Fleming and Zox. Edwin Ruda’s attenuated diamond-shaped canvas reflected the sleek, futuristic aesthetic of many of the Park Place Gallery artists, yet it was positioned as a segue between Gourfain and Insley’s bay and a landing that displayed Robert Barry’s Newman-esque Green Line (1966) and the Pop-inflected psychedelia of Nicholas Krushenick’s Tel Aviv Hippy (1966, fig. 1.7). In short, the installation of

Figure 1.6 Installation of Neil Williams, Sartorial Habits of Billy Bo, 1966, in Systemic Painting. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 21–November 27, 1966. Image courtesy of Dean Borghi Fine Art, New York.

Figure 1.7 Nicholas Krushenk, Tel Aviv Hippy, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 90 × 75 1/2 in. (229 × 192 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Nicholas Krushenick and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

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Systemic Painting revealed the exhibition to be an inclusive survey of contemporary abstract painting interspersed with moments of curatorial didacticism. Most critics, however, failed to recognize the diversity of the works on view.

The Critical Response While reviews of Systemic Painting made scant reference to “Minimalism,” several of them did conform to the twofold, negative usage of the trope of the “minimal” as described by James Meyer: First, the “minimal” was a pejorative allusion to the [art’s] purportedly “simple” organization. . . . Hostile viewers complained that the drastically reduced geometries of the new art lacked complexity, that the visual experience of the work was impoverished. . . . A second, related meaning of the minimal concerned the mode of production employed by these artists. This purging of authorial feeling and demonstrable intention was poorly received by viewers steeped in the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism. . . . Taken collectively, such fears seemed to suggest that the new art barely registered as art, was not-art-enough.55 Though critics generally recognized that Systemic Painting represented the twodimensional analogue to Primary Structures, most viewed the paintings and Alloway’s curatorial efforts with suspicion.56 Andrew Hudson and Jane H. Kay, writing in the Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor, respectively, had the greatest difficulty finding redeeming content in the new reductive aesthetic. The former dismissed the majority of the exhibition as “desert waste,”57 while the latter questioned the presence of an operative intelligence behind these paintings’ mute surfaces, writing: “[T]he line between the simple and the self-delusively simpleminded is a problem that this show does not altogether face up to.”58 Together, these critics supplied both aspects of Meyer’s formulation, with Hudson lamenting the paintings’ austerity and Kay disputing the integrity of the artistic labor that produced them. One of the most persistent questions raised in response to Systemic Painting was the relationship between the art and its supporting catalogue essay. For many observers, it was difficult to reconcile such uncommunicative art with the intellectually ambitious prose it elicited. Alloway’s eagerness to define a new artistic movement only deepened their suspicions. Kay referred to the work as “manifesto art,”59 while the New York Times’ Hilton Kramer deemed it “an art for critics.”60 For these writers, Systemic Painting was an insider’s affair. Kay characterized the show as a “museumartist-aficionado dialogue.”61 Kramer questioned whether this new exhibition, and not just the essay written to illuminate it, can be entirely understood—or understood at all perhaps—without some mastery of this critical literature, for the art in question is intimately bound up with the theoretical positions that have called it forth.62 These critics shared a reactionary anxiety about the role of criticism in contemporary artistic production. Kramer worried that “the traditional relation of art to criticism may now have been reversed, with paintings . . . being produced as commentaries on and realizations of critical ideas.”63 Similarly, Kay lamented that younger artists

26 Systemic Painting seemed to prioritize critical acumen over sincere expression: “[I]ndividualized art becomes not the vagaries of working out an idea on canvas but the final fulmination of that idea, first thought out, then applied. Style seems not an expression but the patenting of an approach.”64 For Kramer and Kay, Systemic Painting signaled the danger that the sensuous plenitude of painting—once the hallmark of American artistic modernism—was ceding ground to a vacuous and cynical conceptualism. Ironically, for critics who supposedly privileged the visual over the conceptual, they were content to allow Alloway’s essay to speak on behalf of the art in his exhibition, making no effort to identify the contradictions between the paintings and the curator’s arguments on their behalf. In a two-part broadside published concurrently in Art and Architecture and Studio International, Dore Ashton—a critic brought up in the traditions of the New York School—spelled out the implications of Kay’s and Kramer’s anxieties. Like them, she decried criticism’s encroachments on art’s sanctity. She cited Alloway’s exhibition as a “glaring example” of a “philological” impulse that plagued contemporary art criticism: “Most critical energy seems to be going into the creation of new categories, ever more finely distinguished, with endless subcategories appended.”65 With only a couple exceptions, she, too, experienced Systemic Painting as a point-by-point illustration of Alloway’s argument: It is clear that no single work is there because it has evoked some peculiar strong reaction in him. Most of the works are there because they represent a point in the abstract argument. Consequently, it is very difficult to look at the paintings individually at all. The set approach is dictated by the very title, not to mention, the way the pictures are installed.66 Ashton’s concerns extended beyond criticism’s untoward influence on contemporary artists. She saw Systemic Painting as symptomatic of critics’ and curators’ growing complicity with New York’s thriving art market. In her piece in Studio International, tellingly titled “Marketing Techniques in the Promotion of Art,” she cited the sociologist C. Wright Mills’ research on the pervasive role of branding in American cultural life. Mills described Americans’ experience of reality as thoroughly mediated by “interpretation centers”—the marketers and admen who churn out brand identities that instill commodities with a “fictitious individuality.”67 For Ashton, the parallels between Mills’ “interpretation centers” and Alloway’s ambitions for Systemic Painting were clear: The art public evidently needs its brand names, and the middle-men are quick to supply them. No one has been more obliging than Lawrence Alloway on this score. . . . [T]he detached scholarly language and the formidable battery of footnotes do not obscure the fact that Alloway is selling something, as are all classifiers and labellers. What they are selling is a smart, new way to approach a brief experience—the exhibition. By the time the provinces have heard the good word, Alloway et al. will have issued new coinage.68 According to Ashton, Alloway was actively applying capitalism’s cycles of planned obsolescence to the once sacrosanct fruits of culture. Furthermore, he was not acting alone but in cahoots with the galleries and dealers who had a financial stake in advancing the careers of these painters. Noting that most of these artists had recent gallery solo shows

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(or in the case of Neil Williams, one that ran concurrently with Systemic Painting), Ashton wrote, “All this co-ordination and timing is worthy of the best promotion agencies.”69 Ashton’s accusations were not without merit. Alloway was acutely aware of the increasingly interconnected nature of the artists, art schools, galleries, museums, critics, curators, and collectors that constituted what he would later dub “the art world.”70 While he would not coin this now ubiquitous term until 1972, his initial conception of it was already in place at the time of Systemic Painting. In his 1966 article, “Art and the Communications Network,” Alloway described the information flows that facilitated the public’s consumption of contemporary art, from the artist’s studio to the gallery, museum, and pages of the art journal or exhibition catalogue. He remarked on the particularly close relationships between museums and galleries occasioned by the former’s deepening engagements with contemporary art: “Museums now show not only new works but new talent. On a different scale and with different motives such activity connects with private galleries (whose profits can be affected by a museum show of one of their artists).”71 Alloway freely admitted that Systemic Painting benefited from such connections. In his first proposal for the exhibition, he wrote that it had the “advantage” of featuring “artists who are new, but not fresh from school”—indicating that he sought painters who were recently legitimized by MFA degrees and gallery representation.72 While Ashton most likely had not read the issue of Canadian Art in which Alloway’s essay was originally published and certainly would not have been privy to his internal Guggenheim memoranda, she was well aware of his reputation amongst New York art world observers as “brash, opportunistic, [and] a hopper on bandwagons,” to quote a New York Times profile of that year.73 Indeed, there was an undeniable element of careerism to Systemic Painting. As his last exhibition at the Guggenheim prior to his much-publicized departure, he hoped it would impart to him the requisite cachet in the contemporary scene to launch the next phase of his career as an independent arts professional, one whose livelihood depended on the successful navigation of the communications network he had recently described.74 Ashton’s essay made explicit the latent anxieties expressed in Kay and Kramer’s reviews. Though their ostensible target was criticism, commerce was not far from their minds. Kay, after all, had written that individual style was no longer “expression but the patenting of an approach.”75 Kramer wrote that the art in Systemic Painting was the impersonal, lifeless result of “the technical implementation of a theoretical possibility,” and as such represented a “flight from sensibility.”76 In these accounts, a “systemic” painter’s practice more closely resembled the calculated strategies of commodity production than the organic and intuitive processes of artistic creation. Alloway’s attempt to characterize the “systemic” as the new expressionism fell on deaf ears, as these critics were united in their belief that abstract painting at mid-decade was under siege. Threatened by an increasingly obscurantist yet influential body of criticism and the machinations of a profit-driven art market, they saw an artistic terrain that choked out genuine expression and aesthetic content. Furthermore, they viewed the mute surfaces on view at the Guggenheim as incapable of offering any resistance to such pernicious forces. If anything, this looked like art that had already surrendered. While some saw Systemic Painting as indicative of attacks on the medium from outside its walls, others saw a house that was about to collapse from within. For critics who were more sympathetic to developments in recent abstraction, the work of Frank Stella was the central axis that structured their responses to the exhibition. Earlier that

28 Systemic Painting year, Stella debuted his Irregular Polygons at Leo Castelli Gallery. As described previously, this series was widely recognized as a pivotal turning point in this influential artist’s career. To observers attuned to the debates surrounding Stella’s practice, the Irregular Polygons represented more than just a change in style; it signaled a commitment to one form of modernism over and against another. Stella’s choice threw into relief the either/or question that confronted abstract painting at mid-decade, and many critics viewed Systemic Painting through this lens. Stella was represented at the Guggenheim by an Irregular Polygon, but his earlier stripe paintings were not far from critics’ minds. Robert Pincus-Witten, in the one review that spoke admiringly of Alloway’s catalogue essay,77 wrote: The importance of Stella, it seems to me, can hardly be underestimated. His painting remains critical for Systemic art, both in the early phase, now affectionately referred to as the ‘pinstripe’ Stella . . . as well as later Stella, in which the perimeter of a shaped canvas no longer acquiesces to the sculptural impulse of refulgent color.78 If Pincus-Witten was aware of the conflicting implications of early and recent Stella, he made no mention of them. His review treats Stella as the paradigmatic “systemic” artist, with both bodies of work presenting viable models for other artists. Other critics did not share Pincus-Witten’s equanimity. Rosalind Krauss wrote in glowing terms of the new, optical Stella (“[T]he color can be invested with an openness which refers to exterior space but does not represent it, and which denies the physicality of the painting as an enframed object.”) and chastised Alloway for the heterogeneity of his exhibition, asserting that an artist like Stella was fundamentally different from a “late Cubist” artist like Al Held and that “no amount of polemic will bring them together.”79 For Krauss, who at this time was still very much under the thrall of Greenberg and Fried, Systemic Painting’s cardinal sin was its leveling of critical distinctions between the most advanced modernist painters (i.e., Stella) and those who explored retrograde tendencies. She also took issue with Alloway’s definition of seriality, which conflicted with the modernist insistence on the autonomy of the individual work.80 Lucy Lippard, who would later write disparagingly of the Irregular Polygons in a 1968 review, approached Systemic Painting with very different sympathies than Krauss, yet she, too, considered Stella to be the key figure in the exhibition.81 In Lippard’s analysis, Systemic Painting featured two relevant forms of contemporary abstraction, both of which traced their parentage to Stella.82 The first, “structural or ‘primary’ painting,” was “often near monotonal, or modular . . . either colorless . . . or very subtly and minutely colored”—a type she identified with Martin, Ryman, Mangold, and Novros, among others.83 The second, “a recent offshoot of hard-edge,” advanced a “new sort of illusionism that superficially contradicts the mainstream tendency of modern painting to assert its native two-dimensionality.” Lippard viewed the latter with disapproval, deeming it a “new kind of trompe l’oeil that has its cake and eats it too.” Though Stella’s involvement forced her to acknowledge the legitimacy of the new “abstract illusionism,” she deemed him the only artist to have “really made something of it.”84 For Lippard, Stella’s newfound illusionism was all the more regrettable given the importance of his early work to her “structural” painters.85 Her review clearly registered the consequences of his defection, noting that the 10 exhibition at the Dwan Gallery—a seminal group show of what she identified as “minimalist” artists also on view that fall—had been jokingly referred to as “‘an anti-Stella show,’ its absolute

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containment being opposed to the kind of idiosyncratic space for which Stella rejected the rejective.”86 Lippard disapproved of the Irregular Polygons because of their implications for the literalist form of abstract painting for which she advocated in her own criticism (a subject discussed in greater depth in the following chapter). She believed Systemic Painting did, in fact, offer a two-dimensional analogue to the Primary Structure in its subgroup of “structural” painters—artists who explored the material possibilities of paint on a flat surface without resorting to illusionism or other anachronistic conventions. She argued that Alloway’s essay, by attempting to relate abstract painting to extra-aesthetic “other experience,”87 did a disservice to these artists’ literalist commitments: Thus the issue of introducing “other experience” into art is, in the context of rejective styles, and for better or for worse, irrelevant. Literature, as a verbal medium, demands a verbal response. But advanced music has not been asked to explain itself symbolically or humanistically for years. Why should painting and sculpture still be scapegoats?88 In hindsight, Alloway’s insistence on abstraction’s openness to “other experience” seems prescient, as we now recognize the myriad ways in which artists, often women and minorities, have encoded reductive abstraction with markers of subjective experience.89 To Lippard writing in 1966, however, Alloway’s polemic represented an affront to his exhibition’s core group of artists committed to a painted aesthetic literalism. Stella’s Irregular Polygons might have delivered a blow to this position, but Lippard nonetheless remained sanguine about the medium’s avant-garde prospects. Mel Bochner offered a more dire interpretation of this same set of circumstances in Arts Magazine. Less a review than a referendum on contemporary painting, Bochner’s article was the one response to Systemic Painting that spoke of painting’s imminent demise, though it reflected a view shared by many of his sculptor peers: Painting may be an obsolete art form, about to join such other previous art forms as mosaics and stained glass windows. Viewed as a closed set, which is a bound group of possibilities, it is probable that artists have more or less exhausted all these possibilities.90 Bochner’s review reflects a thorough internalizing of Judd’s critique of painting.91 As he had been for Pincus-Witten, Krauss, and Lippard, Stella was the lynchpin to Bochner’s understanding of Systemic Painting. He saw the exhibition as filled with artists incapable of acting on the full implications of Stella’s early work: “A great deal of the work in this exhibition is derived from Stella’s formats, not his ideas.”92 For Bochner, as it was for Judd, the ultimate consequence of the stripe paintings was the medium’s sine qua non condition of objecthood: “The ideas implicit in Stella’s work, the clarity of the attitude and the materiality of the result inevitably suggest three-dimensional work, which is probably why most of the interesting work being done today is not being done in painting.”93 Bochner particularly objected to the privileged claims made by modernist critics on behalf of their artistic lodestars, as seen in his comments on Noland: Picturing targets, bands or chevrons is a representational activity. Centralization of the motif or its placement parallel to the framing edge does not change the

30 Systemic Painting picture plane into anything other than a conventional window-on-the-world conception of painting. Noland’s paintings are pictorial.94 This remark also had a direct precedent in Judd, who, in his 1963 review of Noland, wrote, “More essentially it seems impossible to further unite the rectangle and the lines, circles or whatever are on it. The image within the rectangle is obviously a relic of pictured objects in their space.”95 Judd, however, viewed Noland’s work more favorably than Bochner did. While the former believed Noland made the most of the limited resources left to painting, Bochner considered his work irredeemably pictorial and thus no better than any other traditional form of painting. Of all the critics discussed to this point, Bochner adhered to the most fatalistic reading of Stella. Though he understood the stripe paintings in terms similar to Lippard’s (viz. as literal and not optical), she saw them as opening an array of options for a literalist painting practice, whereas he believed they issued a sweeping foreclosure on the medium’s future. In this reading of Stella, Alloway’s vision of a painterly equivalent to the Primary Structure was inherently untenable. However, even a hardened literalist such as Bochner was able to appreciate some of the work on view in Systemic Painting. He singled out Jo Baer’s triptych, Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue (1964–65, Plate 1), alone for praise: The painting by Jo Baer was the most thought provoking in this exhibition yet the least penetrable by thought. The work of Jo Baer does not draw you in. The frame is not a window. . . . Her consciousness of what she is doing goes past the object level of painting. At the same time it does not delude the viewer into any facile transcendence. . . . The colors . . . do not do anything . . . spatially, optically or emotionally. A schema prefigured their choice but it followed its own logical necessity and not any personalized aesthetic.96 Bochner conceived his appreciation of Baer almost entirely in negative terms (her painting was not inviting, not spatial, not an object, not optical, not personal, etc.). In this fashion, he positioned her practice as a circumvention of the extant discourses pertaining to painting. “Her paintings are not ‘about’ painting either as activity or thing,” he wrote.97 Chapter 4 will discuss Bochner’s interest in Baer in greater detail, but for now, it suffices to note that despite all his pessimism regarding painting’s prospects, Bochner, too, saw a means for it to engage with the most vital artistic concerns of his time. In light of his later writings about painting, it is curious that he restricted himself to Baer. Primary Structures had been comparable to Systemic Painting in its heterogeneity, pairing American Minimalists with British modernist sculptors in the orbit Anthony Caro, as well as others, yet it enjoys its privileged historical status as Minimalism’s harbinger, in part due to Bochner’s trenchant review, in which he identified Andre, Judd, LeWitt, Morris, and Smithson as the leading lights of the young generation of object makers.98 One might imagine him likewise winnowing a select group of painters from Systemic Painting’s morass. Two months after its opening, Bochner would go on to feature Mangold, as well as Baer, in his own exhibition cum proto-conceptual artwork, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art at the School of Visual Arts. His quotation montage piece of the following year, “A Compilation for Robert Mangold,” published in Art International,

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drew on sources ranging from Roget’s Thesaurus to St. Augustine to pay homage to the austere banalities of the painter’s palette and geometrically sectioned compositions. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, Bochner and Novros, despite the dramatic differences in their practices, actually shared much in their understanding of wall painting’s formal mechanics and political potential. While his mutual sympathies with these two artists went unmentioned, his comments on Baer suggested that painting was not an entirely lost cause. If Systemic Painting signaled the exhaustion of the medium’s modernist teleology, he acknowledged that certain forms of two-dimensional work were indeed still viable and demanded a radically new theoretical framework and critical vocabulary. The following chapters discuss three such practices.

Notes 1. “Exhibition Proposal,” dated June 16, 1964, Systemic Painting exhibition file, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives. Though this document does not identify its author, it can safely be attributed to Alloway, as significant portions are identical to a subsequent exhibition proposal, dated November 16, 1965, that bears his name. 2. Ibid. 3. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 119. 4. Quoted in Ibid., 45. 5. Alloway’s initial proposal only mentions a few artists by name: Paul Feeley, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, and Neil Williams. 6. “Exhibition Proposal,” dated June 16, 1964. 7. The Shaped Canvas ran at the Guggenheim from December 9, 1964–January 3, 1965 and featured the work of Stella, Feeley, Sven Lukin, Richard Smith, and Neil Williams. The concept of the shaped canvas remained important to Systemic Painting, as 9 of the 28 works in the show employed non-rectangular formats. See Lawrence Alloway, The Shaped Canvas, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1965). 8. Lawrence Alloway, “Op Art: A Response to the Responsive Eye” (lecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, audio recording, reel-to-reel collection (615214T23)). Also quoted in Courtney J. Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s Systems,” in Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator, ed. Lucy Bradnock, et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015), 92. 9. “Exhibition Proposal,” dated November 16, 1965, Systemic Painting exhibition file, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives. 10. Primary Structures had its origins in conversations between its curator Kynaston McShine and the critic Lucy Lippard in the early months of 1965. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 22. 11. Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966), 21, note 8. 12. Ibid. 13. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 7. 14. Lawrence Alloway, “Background to Systemic,” ARTnews 65, no. 6 (October 1966): 30. 15. Ibid., 31. 16. Ibid., 32. In addition to Greenberg’s term, Alloway here refers to Irving Sandler’s “The New Cool-Art,” Art in America 53, no. 1 (February 1965): 96–101 and Barbara Rose’s “ABC Art,” Art in America 53, no. 5 (October/November 1965): 57–69. 17. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 16. 18. Greenberg arranged for Alloway to see Barnett Newman’s retrospective at Bennington College, and correspondence from the 1958 trip mentions numerous interactions with him. Courtney J. Martin, “Art World, Network and Other Alloway Keywords,” Tate Papers 16 (Autumn 2011). www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/16. For more on Alloway’s relationship with Greenberg, see Nigel Whiteley, Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 167–9. 19. These artists were Thomas Downing, Paul Feeley, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Nicholas Krushenick, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella.

32 Systemic Painting 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 222–9. 22. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 16. 23. Alloway, “Background to Systemic,” 32. 24. Ibid. For more on Alloway’s critiques of Post-Painterly Abstraction, see Whiteley, 202–3. 25. For a richer elucidation of Alloway’s notion of “short-term art history” that relates it to his engagements with information theory, see Stephen Moonie, “Mapping the Field: Lawrence Alloway’s Art Criticism-as-Information,” Tate Papers 16 (Autumn 2011). www.tate.org.uk/ research/publications/tate-papers/16. 26. Alloway, “Background to Systemic,” 32. 27. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 19. 28. Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s Systems,” 88–90. See also Whiteley, 203. 29. Quoted in Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s Systems,” 88. 30. Ibid., 89. 31. For a nuanced reading of the Stations’ use of seriality and their relationship to the period’s debates surrounding this topic, see Sarah K. Rich, “Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1999), 147–68. For more on Newman’s relationship to the art of the sixties, see the entirety of ibid., as well as Sarah K. Rich, “Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue,” American Art 19, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 17–39 and Richard Shiff, “Whiteout: The Not-Influence Newman Effect,” in Barnett Newman, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 77–111. 32. Sarah K. Rich writes, “[I]t is possible to read Newman’s serial works as a corrective impulse, an attempt on the part of an older artist to take up and then revamp a fresh avant-garde strategy according to the traditions of his own generation.” Rich, “Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman,” 147. 33. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 12. Also quoted in Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s Systems,” 94. 34. Martin and Rich have similarly described the significance of Newman’s exhibition to Alloway’s professional ambitions. See Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s Systems,” 94 and Rich, “Difference and Seriality,” 171–2. 35. For a thorough account of seriality in sixties art and culture, see Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 76–146 and Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 166–88. 36. Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 97–8. 37. Fried, “Three American Painters,” 255–6. Also quoted in Ibid., 88. 38. For more on Fried’s paradoxical understanding of seriality, see Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 88–91. 39. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 16–17. 40. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” reprinted in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 190. 41. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 18. Alloway never explicitly acknowledges Rosenberg’s importance to his argument. In fact, he only mentions Rosenberg to note the older critic’s fading relevance to contemporary criticism. Ibid., 16. Of the many critics who responded to “Systemic Painting,” only Rosalind Krauss remarked on Alloway’s debts to Rosenberg. Rosalind Krauss, “Letters,” Artforum 5, no. 4 (December 1966): 4. 42. Lawrence Alloway and Barnett Newman, Barnett Newman, the Stations of the Cross, lema sabachthani, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966), 12. 43. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 23. 44. Ibid., 25. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Frank Stella, “Questions to Stella and Judd: Interview by Bruce Glaser, Edited by Lucy R. Lippard,” reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, 158. 47. Ibid., 19. 48. Alloway, “Background to Systemic,” 33. Alloway coined the term “One Image” to describe the work by artists who repeatedly used a single formal configuration in multiple canvases, such as Noland’s chevrons, Feeley’s quatrefoils, etc. See also Alloway, Systemic Painting, 18.

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49. Mel Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,” reprinted in Solar Systems and Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965–2007 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 22. 50. In this essay, Alloway states that Tuchman invited him to apply his painting-based argument to recent sculpture. Lawrence Alloway, “Serial Forms,” in American Sculpture of the Sixties, ed. Maurice Tuchman, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967), 14. 51. Ibid. 52. The following description of the exhibition’s installation is based on the document “Installation of Systemic Painting, September 21–November 27, 1966,” Systemic Painting exhibition file, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives. 53. Alloway, Systemic Painting, 19. 54. Ibid. 55. Meyer, Minimalism, 3. 56. In his review of the exhibition, Peter Schjeldahl declared the fall season “The Year of the System and the Primary Structure.” “Systems ’66,” Village Voice, September 29, 1966. Similar acknowledgements of the relationship between the two exhibitions are found in Jane H. Kay, “Systemic Painting,” Christian Science Monitor, November 7, 1966 and Andrew Hudson, “N.Y. Show Reveal Artists on the Rise-and in Decline,” The Washington Post, November 6, 1966. 57. Hudson. 58. Kay. 59. Ibid. 60. Hilton Kramer, “‘Systemic Painting’: An Art for Critics,” New York Times, September 18, 1966. 61. Kay. 62. Kramer. 63. Ibid. 64. Kay, 6. 65. Dore Ashton, “Art,” Art and Architecture 83, no. 10 (November 1966): 6. 66. Ibid. Ashton does single out Held and Youngerman for praise, saying their work resisted Alloway’s categorization. 67. Quoted in Dore Ashton, “Marketing Techniques in the Promotion of Art,” Studio International 172, no. 83 (November 1966): 270. For the complete Mills essay, see C. Wright Mills, “Man in the Middle: The Designer,” reprinted in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 374–86. 68. Ashton, “Marketing Techniques in the Promotion of Art,” 270. 69. Ibid. 70. Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System,” Artforum 11, no. 1 (September 1972): 27–31. For more on the development of Alloway’s conception of this topic, see Martin, “Artworld, Network and Other Alloway Keywords.” 71. Lawrence Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” reprinted in Imagining the Present, 114. 72. Alloway, “Exhibition Proposal,” November 16, 1964. 73. Grace Glueck, “Not Exactly Trying to Please,” New York Times, June 16, 1966. 74. Alloway resigned from the Guggenheim in 1966 following his disagreement with the museum’s director, Thomas Messer, over the contents of the United States’ pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale. See Whiteley, 220–2. Courtney J. Martin has similarly characterized “Systemic Painting” as essential to Alloway’s ambitions for his post-Guggenheim career. Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s Systems,” 94. 75. Emphasis added. 76. Kramer. 77. “Alloway’s exhibition has been made even more insightful by its accompanying catalog, a seriously argued historical précis and well-documented work.” Robert Pincus-Witten, “‘Systemic Painting,’” Artforum 5, no. 3 (November 1966): 43. 78. Ibid. 79. Krauss, “Letters,” 4.

34 Systemic Painting 80. Ibid. Ironically, Krauss would later agree with Alloway about the “mutually elucidating” function of the modernist series, though she arrived at this conclusion via a markedly different reasoning. Informed by the writings of Walter Benjamin and semiotic theory, she argued in a pair of articles published in 1974 that the series undermined the autonomy of the modernist picture by displacing meaning onto the relationships between individual works. Rosalind Krauss, “Pictorial Space and the Question of Documentary,” Artforum 10, no. 3 (November 1971): 68–71 and “Stella’s New Work and the Problem of Series,” Artforum 10, no. 4 (December 1971): 41–3. 81. Lippard described Stella’s Irregular Polygons and the series that followed as “unconvincing,” “unambitious decorations,” and a reversal of his “broadly accepted principles.” Lucy R. Lippard, reprinted in “Excerpts: Olitski, Criticism and Rejective Art, Stella,” in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971), 211. 82. A third, which she termed “Hard Edge,” exemplified by the work of Leon Smith, Dean Fleming, Kelly, and Huot, “could have been eliminated without detriment to the show as a unity or a proposition. Lucy R. Lippard, “After a Fashion: The Group Show,” The Hudson Review 29, no. 4 (Winter 1966–67): 620. 83. Ibid., 621. 84. Ibid. 85. “Ironically, a major influence on his peers in the formation of a structural painting, last year Stella moved into a style that entirely denies monochromatic and symmetrical principles. . . . Often disappointing, often brilliant, they seem to be part of a ‘transitional period,’ though Stella is conceptually strong enough to carry it off despite uncertainties.” Ibid. 86. Ibid., 622. 87. Per Alloway, “The pressing problem of art criticism now is to re-establish abstract art’s connections with other experience without, of course, abandoning the now general sense of art’s autonomy.” Alloway, Systemic Painting, 20. 88. Lippard, “After a Fashion,” 626. 89. For example, this openness to subjective experience was a motivating principle behind the exhibition, High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975. See Katy Siegel and David Reed, eds., High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975, exh. cat. (New York: National Academy Museum; New York: Independent Curators International; New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2007). 90. Mel Bochner, “Systemic Painting,” reprinted in Solar Systems and Restrooms, 14. 91. For Bochner’s account of the importance of Judd’s writings to his early art and criticism, see “Judd’s Writings,” reprinted in Solar Systems and Restrooms, 197–199. James Meyer also briefly discusses Judd’s influence on the “Systemic Painting” review, Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 171. 92. Bochner, “Systemic Painting,” 15. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 14. 95. Donald Judd, “Kenneth Noland,” reprinted in Complete Writings 1959–1975, 93. 96. Bochner, “Systemic Painting,” 15. 97. Ibid. 98. Mel Bochner, “Primary Structures,” reprinted in Solar System and Rest Rooms, 8–11.

2

Robert Mangold Minimalist Dialectics in the Walls and Areas

Minimalist Dialectics Systemic Painting revealed the notion of a Minimalist painting to be—from the moment of its inception—deeply fraught and, to some, paradoxical. Nevertheless, Minimalism as a critical term has been a constant in the reception of several painters featured in the exhibition, with Robert Mangold arguably chief among them. Mangold himself has discussed Minimalism with greater equanimity than many of his peers, most of whom have strenuously disavowed the term: I am often referred to as a “Minimal painter” and I have learned to accept this because I think it may be of some use. It connects my work with a particular time and place: mid 1960s to mid 1970s in New York City. It also suggests a simplified means and structure. I do not find this terribly misleading, so in a sense I accept its usefulness.1 While the sculptors objected to the critical differences obscured by such a catch-all term, Mangold appreciates that it affirms his connection to a specific artistic milieu, which, it must be added, has come to be viewed as predominantly sculptural in character. Mangold’s critics have almost without exception followed suit, finding some value in locating his art within Minimalism’s remit. For example, curator Lynn Cooke, writing in 1990, maintained that Mangold’s Minimalist credentials were indisputable: [Mangold’s] oeuvre clearly warrants the appellation of Minimalist, in that his aesthetic posits the work of art as a self-contained material entity, shorn of all subjective or metaphorical additions, all metaphysics and transcendental idealism: it reveals itself directly to the viewer, the viewer defined as a perceiving subject occupying the same real space and actual time as does the object.2 One can imagine Cooke basing this classification on a work like Untitled (Pale Red) (1973, Plate 2), a painting from his first series to combine the off-kilter drawn geometric figures and eccentrically shaped canvases for which he remains best known today. Cooke astutely captures the literalist character of Mangold’s art. With its notched silhouette, reminiscent of a Stella Aluminum painting, Untitled (Pale Red) addresses the viewer as an object rather than as a conveyor of pictorial illusion. The notches also establish the coordinates of the two drawn semi-circles, which, because they relate to

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Robert Mangold

the limits of the work’s material support, clearly delineate its physical surface rather than hovering against a recessive spatial matrix. These geometric figures are rendered with mechanical precision, betraying nary a quiver of the artist’s hand. Mangold applied the underlying titular pale red with a house painter’s roller, yielding a resolutely flat and uniform facture that is bereft of painterly incident or any conventional markers of compositional choice. Viewed in these terms, Untitled (Pale Red) can be understood, per Cooke, as evincing all the hallmarks of Minimalist art: perspicuous materiality, conceptual clarity, and semiotic and temporal literality. But such an account surely does not take the full measure of Untitled (Pale Red) for it neglects the very elements that give the work its undeniable charge. For example, while the two semi-circles relate deductively to the dimensions of the support, what makes them compelling as forms is the mind’s inclination to fuse them into a perfect circle despite the evident difference in their diameters. The drawn curves and literal shape of the canvas each pressures the perception of the other, short-circuiting the channels between perception and cognition, such that it becomes impossible to simultaneously contemplate the object of sense data and the image it conjures forth in the mind’s eye.3 To modify Stella’s famous dictum, with a Mangold, what you see is what you see, but it is not necessarily what you think you see. Furthermore, one might contest Cooke’s claim that Mangold inoculates his work against metaphor and metaphysics, as its uncanny inscriptions and circumscriptions invite comparisons to the manifold ways in which value systems have been found to obtain in geometric forms throughout the course of human history. For example, other of Mangold’s critics have described his paintings as representing a kind of anti-humanist geometry that subverts the rationalist idealism expressed in a drawing like Leonardo da Vinci’s famed Vitruvian Man.4 Similarly, one might question the literalism of Mangold’s use of color. Yes, Untitled (Pale Red) disavows painterly gesture and illusion. Its title identifies its monochromatic ground as so much a statement of fact. But what kind of color is this pale red? Mangold seems to have identified a chromatic inflection point, at which red could just as easily be identified as brown or orange. It is a hue that could be associated with architecture as readily as it could flesh. Throughout his career, Mangold has demonstrated an abiding ability to locate the interstices of our chromatic imaginary, providing a grand stage to neglected recesses of the color wheel. These colors thwart easy naming or contextualization. The pale red of Untitled (Pale Red) may well be just that, conveying nothing more than the facticity of that hue, but it also speaks to the yawning chasm that separates the sensorial plenitude of the world and the representational systems we possess to process it. I do not contest Cooke’s assessment of Mangold’s Minimalism to argue against his inclusion in this movement but rather to complicate our sense of his place within it. If Minimalism is best understood as a differential field, rather than as a stock set of formal shibboleths, then locating Mangold’s position within that field requires parsing his work’s unique purchase on the discourses that constituted it. As intimated by the preceding discussion of the tensions at work in Untitled (Pale Red), Mangold’s is an art of dialectics, in which antitheses uneasily coexist within an integrated aesthetic totality, and this dialectical mentality was present at a remarkably early moment in his development. Mangold’s paintings of the sixties—rather than presenting a cohesive, fully realized instantiation of painterly Minimalism—can more profitably be read as the learning curve of a young artist, testing what was viable in his medium at a time of

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extreme adversity. The path from his earliest hard-edged abstractions through the several discrete series he produced in this decade consists of a sequence of breakthroughs and cul-de-sacs, innovations and missteps. His practice was forged in a crucible of competing pressures, as he sought to formulate a meaningful response to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, while simultaneously contending with pressing developments in the sculptural arena. He thus developed his work in an incremental, episodic fashion, developing his own voice by triangulating between these two powerful forces. When Mangold moved to New York in 1962, following the completion of his B.F.A. at Yale but with one year remaining on his M.F.A., he arrived with an already sophisticated understanding of the city’s artistic terrain.5 He had been exposed to New York School painting as early as high school, when his mother, a department store buyer in upstate New York, took him on her purchasing trips to the city, during which he would venture out on his own to see exhibitions at Martha Jackson Gallery, among others. A later formative encounter with the postwar avant-garde came in 1958, during his third year of studying at the Cleveland Institute of Art, when he visited the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, which featured the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, and Franz Kline, as well as that of European artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Alberto Burri, who broadened his conception of painting’s material possibilities. The Clyfford Still exhibition the following year at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, near his hometown of North Tonawanda, New York, was another early revelation for the young artist. However, it was not until arriving at Yale (first enrolling at the university’s summer program in Norfolk before transferring to the B.F.A. track) that his privately cultivated appreciation for advanced abstraction found a suitably progressive and encouraging institutional environment in which it could truly take root. Unlike Cleveland, whose faculty adhered to a conservative academic curriculum and cared little for artistic developments in New York, Yale offered a more open pedagogical spirit and set its compass to the burgeoning art capital just across the state line. Mangold arrived in New Haven shortly after the retirement of Josef Albers, the legendary Bauhaus and Black Mountain College master, and while Albers remained an influential figure in New Haven, his grip on the curriculum had begun to loosen as authority transitioned to Neil Welliver and Bernard Chaet, two figurative painters on the faculty. Of particular importance to Mangold as a mentor was Alex Katz, who was one of the younger faculty members and was well-connected to other emerging New York artists. Yale in the early sixties has achieved near-mythical status, due to the enrollment of such artists as Chuck Close, Janet Fish, Eva Hesse, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, and Mangold’s wife, Sylvia Plimack Mangold. However, the school was not necessarily the laboratory of innovation that its alumni roster would suggest, as Mangold recalled many of his classmates outwardly aspiring to fill the ranks of the third and fourth generations of Abstract Expressionism.6 He, too, experimented with a period of brushy, gestural abstract painting, with Philip Guston and Mark Rothko serving as particularly significant influences. However, by the early sixties, he had changed tack, refracting Action painting’s gestural vigor through the precisely articulated forms of hard-edged abstraction.7 This body of work, which owed much to the letter fragment compositions of Al Held, whom he had met through Katz while at Yale, would be the subject of his first solo exhibition at the Thibaut Gallery in 1964 (Katz also facilitated Mangold’s introduction to Thibaut, where he had exhibited). Comprising paintings that featured curvilinear

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abstract figures with the graphic punch of commercial signage, the show garnered strong reviews from several soon-to-be influential critics. Michael Fried called Mangold “a young painter of obvious gifts”;8 Jane Harrison heralded him as “a brilliant new addition to the New York scene”;9 and Lucy Lippard, who was his colleague at the Museum of Modern Art (he a guard, she a librarian) and downstairs neighbor in their Bowery loft building, declared him to be “[o]ne of the most exciting new painters in the tough, cool vein.”10 Such praise might have been enough to convince a young artist that he had discovered terrain that warranted sustained exploration, but Mangold, perhaps sensing that he had veered stylistically too close to Held’s orbit, embarked on a markedly different body of work that would constitute, both in his eyes and those of informed observers, his foray into the aesthetic arena now known as Minimalism. While Mangold was no longer deploying the gestural movements or psychic dramaturgy of Abstract Expressionism, he continued to draw on what he saw to be its radical implications for painting’s self-definition, particularly as spelled out in the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Remarks given in two different interviews speak to the movement’s abiding significance for him: I saw a Rothko painting. . . . You could bathe in the light-color. Viewing this work was like a spiritual moment; I was stunned by this painting, and yet the paint was thinly applied—barely there. For me these experiences made me realize what painting’s unique reality was: neither object nor window. It existed in the space between.11 When you were in front of a Rothko or a Newman you were within their structure. I think that really appealed to me and also the idea that a work of art could have this kind of presence without being an object, without being material in anyway. . . . In Newman, the painting was physical and yet it was not made of material, it was of image.12 Neither object, nor window; physical yet not material. Mangold eloquently describes the dialectical tight wire that James Meyer would later identify as the historically foreclosed “third way” between literalism and opticality.13 For this artist, the best art of the previous decade upheld the possible resolution of the aesthetic polarity that so divided the art of his generation. However, mere imitation was not an option. The insights of Rothko and Newman had to be reworked for his own historical moment. Mangold embarked on his mature work with an acute awareness of the competing critical pressures surrounding painting in the early sixties. He has recalled this period as a time when a young painter’s options were highly circumscribed: Such periods are not only times when you find out what painting is about but what’s possible. And a lot of things seemed just totally impossible. One of the things I guess you have to do is kind of reinvent painting, and one way of doing that is to make a painting in the most basic way, which for me at that moment meant considering the shape and the surface and nothing more.14 As a young artist I was engaged in a particular moment in history. It was a germinal moment, and I was shaped by its forces and the particular situation of 1960s

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New York. Prior movements and artists had set that situation; my task as an artist was to find a way to make relevant work in their aftermath. I could deal with what had been already brought to the table, or I could clear everything off and redefine what painting could be for me. I tried to work with a clear table.15 These are ambivalent remarks. He both “cleared the table” and was “shaped by [the decade’s] forces”; he “reinvented” painting yet acknowledged occupying a stage set by preexisting actors. In this pressured artistic culture, innovation always had to be cross-checked with precedent. Though he aspired to a radical renewal of painting, such an endeavor was by necessity a function of his inherited historical horizon. At a very early stage, Mangold understood that advanced work was always in part a proposition designed to test art’s limits. Writing in 1967, he stated: “Advanced art challenges concepts of present art, presents a certain statement, and contains within it questions as to its own validity. The result is a chancy experience-position for spectator and artist.”16 This interrogative spirit was essential to Mangold’s early work. Each successive group of paintings established specific formal parameters for a kind of artistic hypothesizing, in which he revisited the critical terms of his medium—color, material, shape, edge, facture, line—to establish what remained viable at a time when its options appeared increasingly circumscribed.

Dialectics in Formation For a body of work conventionally deemed “Minimalist,” Mangold’s first mature paintings were galvanized by what now seems an unlikely catalyst. He has frequently discussed the importance of Pop art to his early development. In his estimation, the derivatives of Abstract Expressionism that filled the city’s galleries had grown insular and solipsistic, whereas Pop brought the outside world into the studio and broadened the artist’s purview: Pop art reintroduced the outside, the street, the familiar, the banal, and the idea of a preconceived picture. . . . I wanted to make paintings that extended the kind of serious dialogue I saw in the work of Newman and Rothko, but the only way seemingly to do this was through a door that Pop Art opened.17 Elsewhere, Mangold has attributed to Pop his use of “industrial materials and paints and fragments of architecture”—in short, all the building blocks of his first mature works.18 Mangold’s experience with Pop speaks to the heterogeneous aesthetics of the early sixties discussed previously. While today Pop is generally considered to be a phenomenon diametrically opposed in its methods and motivations to Abstract Expressionism, the young Robert Mangold saw it as a means to engage the best art of the fifties. Furthermore, he viewed Pop as being of a piece with the industrial surfaces of Minimalist sculpture: People were using spray paints and doing things that were coming out of contemporary industry, materials and so on, and it was another way of dealing with painting. I just take it from the perspective of painting. Obviously, if you’re doing sculpture, it’s different. It’s even more clear for Judd or people like that.19

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Mangold’s description of the imbricated nature of these “movements” is telling. He considers the sixties as a whole—from Pop, to Minimalism, to Conceptual art—to be a gradual unfolding of the implications of New York School painting: I think that Abstract Expressionism was the initial impetus for everything that has gone on here; up to this point there have been reactions against it and further reactions but still all coming from the same source. . . . That initial, generating energy which caused Pop Art and everything that followed for a number of years; all the movements were really an extension of one energy movement.20 In this reading, Abstract Expressionism becomes a generative force on the order of the Big Bang—an explosive cluster of potential energy that issued forth a panoply of diverse yet contiguous aesthetic developments. Mangold’s account speaks to a time when ideas were free flowing and battle lines not yet fully drawn. If Pop offered Mangold certain key permissions, his borrowings from it were always refracted through his commitment to rigorous abstraction. There is an asceticism to his early work that had no truck with what he saw as Pop’s indulgence of novelty: “There was a silliness in a lot of Pop Art and Kinetic Art of this time—art that moved, blinked, made sounds, was gaglike. I was not interested in any of that stuff.”21 In fact, his stated ambition was to make art that was challenging—art that resisted visual delectation and did not have an already established audience. As he told Lucy Lippard at mid-decade: Although I don’t consider my pieces radical in the sense of denouncing traditional painting. . . . I do feel they are a reaction to the “easy art” of recent years—Pop, Op, and even the hard-edge jazzy school—the everybody-can-like-it-and-collect-it kind of picture. I think that like religious or historical painting of the past, these groups have given the public outside reasons for liking and thus accepting their work—the subject matter of Pop, the color-shape gymnastics of Op, and the combination of brilliant color, exciting shape, and new materials of hard-edge painting and sculpture. I think my work and others—notably Frank Stella’s—mark a return to an antidecorative difficult art.22 These comments recall his earlier remark that a painting should present a “chancy experience-position for spectator and artist.” Each work presented a joint gambit— a proposition for art in which risk and uncertainty were shared by artist and viewer alike. Thus, Pop entered Mangold’s work through the back door. He avoided its more explicit references to commercial culture and instead assimilated its secondary or tertiary characteristics. Robert Storr eloquently described this relationship as follows: Where Pop artists such as Warhol, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman had gleaned forms and ornamental effects from their surroundings and reconfigured them into pictures of that milieu, Mangold selectively recontextualized unique details of color and texture into paintings devoid of representation; what was flat background or interval in their work was expansive foreground in his. Indeed in combination with external shape and internal division of that shape, the relocated colors and textures were the whole image.23

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Of course, the other incipient phenomenon with which Mangold had to contend was sculpture. He has described his early work as an attempt to reconcile painting with emergent Minimalist sculptural practices: “[T]here was a whole set of values that sculpture was bringing in and I was trying to figure them out in terms of painting.”24 In his telling, three-dimensional work in the sixties possessed a brashness and urgency that was impossibly to deny: To understand that time you have to remember that there was an incredible division between painting and sculpture. I mean, painting was really the avant-garde area of art. If you think of abstract expressionist painting and the sculpture that went with it—for instance, David Smith was out of Picasso. Sculpture was really in a retarded position in relation to painting. Then in the sixties, sculpture really mushroomed, and in a sense was filling a void. It was at that time people said, “Well, painting is dead” you know, and everybody was going into sculpture.25 The way in which Mangold’s early work foregrounded the object quality of a twodimensional surface has prompted several writers to relate it to Donald Judd’s notion of the “specific object.”26 The Walls in particular, with their wooden rails and metal moldings, bring painting into the realm of relief, exemplifying Judd’s characterization of “the best new work” as being “neither painting nor sculpture” but rather occupying a hybrid zone between the two.27 While Mangold would later directly respond to both the art and polemics of Minimalist sculptors like Judd and Morris, it should be noted that his first forays into what he called “constructed painting” had earlier antecedents.28 He began the Walls in 1963, at roughly the same time as Judd and Morris’s first exhibitions of their object-based work and two years before the publication of “Specific Objects.”29 His earliest awareness of the “objecthood” of painting did not come from these sculptors, or even from Stella’s striped paintings (though these were an important, if subsequent, precedent), but rather from the work of Jasper Johns, George Ortman, and Alfred Jensen.30 Both Ortman and Johns were important reference points for Judd’s “Specific Objects” as well31—a reminder that this essay was less a prescriptive manifesto than a retrospective assessment of trends that had gradually materialized during the first half of the decade.32 For all their austerity, the Walls reveal a young artist working through a raft of complex formal issues. The essential terms of his aesthetic lexicon of the sixties can be found here: blunt materiality, idiosyncratic color, jarring asymmetry, modular seriality, and compositional fragmentation. Mangold was by no means the only painter to identify his art with the wall at this time. David Novros, the subject of the following chapter, referred to his modular canvases as “portable murals” and aspired to a practice comprised solely of in situ frescoes. Will Insley applied his architectural training in the fifties to grid-based paintings he called “Wall Fragments.”33 David Lee’s contribution to Systemic Painting, For a Wall, to Jill, consisted of a modular arrangement of monochrome canvases that echoed the lateral spread of its architectural support. Indeed, the powerful precedent of mural-scaled paintings by Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, Rothko, and Newman, coupled with the sixties’ literalist imperative, must have left some painters feeling that the wall was painting’s final refuge.34 Mangold carved out a unique niche within this generational trend by most fully embracing the anti-aesthetic dimension of this architectural idiom. With their industrial palette, lumberyard materiality, and homely

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silhouettes, the Walls practically dared viewers not to call them art—a proposition to which certain critics readily assented. A close reading of a small, unassuming early work from this series can illuminate many of the intersecting themes and formal devices operative in the Walls. Brown Corner (1964, fig. 2.1 a, b, c) resembles an L, turned 90 degrees counterclockwise. With its horizontal arm just over 12 inches and the vertical just less than 8 inches, it is barely large enough to register as an architectural fragment. For Mangold, this fragmentary quality imbued these works with the veracity of lived experience: We moved to New York in 1962. I was affected by the environment, the visual toughness of lower Manhattan surfaces and colors, the sense of fragmentation of things, of seeing only parts of buildings, trucks, sky, signs—the arbitrariness of what you saw.35 I remember my experiences when walking on the street, riding a subway, or a bus, I would see everything in fragments, in sections—the section of a truck, the section of a building. You don’t see the total, but the fragment becomes its own kind of total.36 The partial glimpses that constituted New York’s visual environment opened up new possibilities for composition. The resulting works ran riot with notions of aesthetic autonomy, forcing viewers to accept the object before them as sufficient and complete despite its intimations to the contrary. They functioned as a kind of obstructed synecdoche, in which the part stood in for a non-existent whole. “The piece was part of a total that did not exist,” Mangold stated, “and therefore it was in fact complete.”37 In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno prized the fragment for its ability to wrest the work of art from the realm of myth back to the disharmonious ground of contemporary life from which it originated: The ideological, affirmative aspect of the concept of the successful artwork has its corrective in the fact that there are no perfect works. If they did exist, reconciliation would be possible in the midst of the unreconciled, to which realm art belongs. In perfect works art would transcend its own concept; the turn to the

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 2.1 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Brown Corner, 1964, oil and aluminum on wood, 7 7/8 × 12 1/2 in. (20 × 31.8 cm). © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of Pace Gallery.

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friable and the fragmentary is in truth an effort to save art by dismantling the claim that artworks are what they cannot be and what they nevertheless must want to be; the fragment contains both those elements.38 So it is with Brown Corner, which sits before the viewer as a fully realized object of aesthetic expression while simultaneously sowing doubts about that status by pointing back to the quotidian dimension from which it was seemingly excised. Besides its arrested silhouette, the most immediately conspicuous attributes of Brown Corner are its insipid palette and blunt materiality. Painted with a commercial oil paint on a plywood support outfitted with aluminum moldings, the work has a decidedly non-arty character.39 Mangold has described his unorthodox materials as an escape from painting’s conventions: And the reason I had abandoned stretched canvas initially was that it was too much of an art material. I mean stretched canvas was about making paintings. And if you went to a lumberyard, there were all these different materials you could work on. They were just materials. They didn’t have an identity.40 For Mangold, the lumberyard existed outside of tradition. “[S]tretched canvas was about making paintings,” and Brown Corner certainly did not resemble any form of painting then found in New York galleries. Its aluminum moldings, punctuated by nails, and visible plywood grain evoked household construction more than they did fine art.41 Its 3-inch-deep inner edges and right side were painted, denying an exclusively frontal viewing, while its topmost and left edges were unpainted, exposing the banal materiality of its support and creating the illusion that it was sawed off and excised from a larger, functional architectural form. The fate of Wall paintings that Mangold deemed unsuccessful speaks to the aesthetic brinksmanship these works enacted. In his telling, the Walls stood on the cusp of art—one false move and they could teeter into the realm of the unaesthetic: I remember making a wall-painting that used pegboard on the upper half. After I decided that it was not a good work, I gave it to Eva Hesse—she lived across the street from my studio on the Bowery. She thought she could use it as a partition in the kitchen. Some of the failed wall paintings became actual walls. I made a desk out of one of them.42 Recalling Mangold’s description of advanced art as a “chancy experience-position,” the Walls limned the boundary of “painting as object” and an ordinary object. Part of his task was to discern what criteria might determine that boundary.43 And yet a work like Brown Corner does partake in painting’s conventions. In fact, one could even argue that it displays a perverse form of Greenbergian opticality. Though the work’s lumberyard materials are essential to its identity, they are all but concealed beneath Mangold’s even application of cardboard brown oil paint. He has described his fascination with paint’s ability to abrogate three-dimensional materiality, particularly as seen in the urban environment: “I was also interested in the way that paint was used in the subways, the way it would go over pipes and across posts and in a sense flatten out a totally 3-dimensional space.”44 The flattening Mangold describes can be found in Brown Corner. Paint masks the material differences between

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the aluminum and plywood, and from a few steps back, it obscures the nails, which on close viewing, denote the rhythms of its construction. The paint creates an insistent two-dimensionality—not in the interest of transcendentally effulgent chroma, as in Greenbergian opticality—but to establish dialectical tension between the individual painted surfaces and the three-dimensional materiality of the whole.45 Mangold’s use of color in the Walls introduced an additional set of references that further complicated viewers’ perception of their materiality. While their silhouettes, with their allusions to windows, cutouts, and doorways, quoted the built environment, their palette had decidedly different sources. The cardboard brown of Brown Corner, for example, is more readily associated with packaging materials than interior decoration. Similarly, Mangold has listed other non-architectural antecedents for colors used in the series: I did a piece in a paperbag brown, and I did—oh, I remember, I think I still have this green stapler whose color I used. You know, I would try to take colors that you’re used to having around all the time—manila envelope tan, and so on, and I think that I got a lot of the color that I put into those works from seen things.46 Color and materiality in the Walls operate in distinction from one another. Though both speak the language of industry, they are mutually confounding, rather than complementary. Mangold obscures one order of banality with another. Even in a work like Red Wall (1965, Plate 3), painted in a deep brick red, the surface’s obdurate flatness dissociates it from the tactility and organizational rhythms of brick-and-mortar construction. Modularity—a compositional strategy that Mangold has deployed to a variety of ends throughout his career—also had its origins in the Walls. He has attributed his interest in repeated forms to an anti-compositional impulse that ran through much of his work in the sixties. Repeated, standardized units absolved the artist of a certain amount of decision making: “[The] building materials I was using came in a standard four-foot by eight-foot size, so whatever other structural decisions were made I knew the work would have a seam every four feet.”47 There is a one-thing-after-another, matter-of-fact materialism to this statement that echoes the visual rhetoric of artists like Judd and Andre. However, Mangold also understood that the seams between his modular units, unlike those of his sculptor peers, had pictorial consequences: With those early pieces I got involved in sectioning and when you section a painting, certain things happen. One of the things is that it makes everything stay on the surface. . . . The other thing that the division of panels does, it keeps reinforcing the edge. It keeps making you think about the edge, because the edge is in the center. If the edge were just on the edge, you could drift into the painting. . . . [T]he sectioning started out as a material thing. But I realized that there were certain formal and psychological things that the line does and the way that it affects how you read something became more and more important.48 Mangold’s seams have a clear precedent in Barnett Newman’s vertical “Zips”—one that he both acknowledges and tweaks (fig. 2.2).49 His description of their formal efficacy even echoes that of the Zip, as formulated by Clement Greenberg: “The limiting edges of Newman’s larger canvases, we now discover, act just like the lines inside

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Figure 2.2 Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Onement IV, oil and casein on canvas, 33 × 38 in. (84 × 97 cm). Fund for Contemporary Art and National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. © 2018 Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image licensed by Bridgeman Images.

them: to divide but not to separate or enclose or bound: to delimit but not to limit.”50 Both seam and Zip instantiate the outer edge within the pictorial field, emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane and denying illusionistic forays into depth. However, where the Zip’s location was the product of Newman’s privileged intuition, the seam was always centered—a result of the material’s industrial specifications. If the Zip was Newman’s solution to composition, the seam was Mangold’s circumvention of it. As he wrote in the catalogue to “Systemic Painting”: “Chose not to allow the panel break to occur, except at the measured center, keeping it from becoming a proportionalcompositional division.”51 Of course, the most obvious difference between the Zip and the seam is that the latter is not painted, but is rather a physical gap between two modular units. The seam is a slippery formal device. Possessing none of the Zip’s assertive presence, its appearance fluctuates with the vagaries of the aesthetic encounter. Whereas (in the Greenbergian reading) the Zip announces the optical transcendence of the picture plane, the seam hews the dialectical knife’s edge between the literal and optical. From up close, it is clearly a gap, a visible space that gives way to the supporting wall. Only

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when the viewer withdraws does the seam assume its graphic character, coming into focus as what appears to be a drawn, vertical black line. As seen in a work like Yellow Wall (Section I + II) (1964, Plate 4), the seam confuses, rather than elucidates, the object’s material presence. Seen from a vantage point that grants a view of the work’s complete silhouette, the two protruding horizontal rails fuse into a singular one that is bisected by what appears to be a thin, drawn line. The empty spaces between the four vertical appendages cohere into cutouts—strong pockets of negative space that have their own symmetrical axis distinct from the seam’s division of the work along its vertical midline. Drawing closer to the painting brings the seam’s modular character into focus, imparting its central, physical division of the work with greater visual gravity (e.g., one now notices that there are two rails and not one, and the cutouts’ cohesive gestalt diminishes). In short, Mangold’s seams can by turns appear to be the demarcation lines of a literalist modular practice or an illusionistic device that introduces optical ambiguity. The pressing question that Mangold soon confronted in developing the Walls was how far these works should venture into three-dimensional space, an issue that had as much to do with spectatorship as it did aesthetics. He appeared to equivocate on this point from the outset. In Brown Corner, for example, he painted the right edge while leaving the left exposed, as if testing the viability of both treatments. Painted edges opened the work to a full 180-degree visual arc and elicited a mobile and embodied form of viewing more readily associated with relief sculpture, whereas unpainted edges kept visual interest on the two-dimensional plane, giving the work a purely frontal address. Mangold’s ambivalence on this issue reached a tipping point later in 1964. One strand of his work probed progressively deeper into three dimensions. The nowdestroyed Grey window wall (1964, fig. 2.3)—a large ‘[’-shaped piece that created a fragment of a large window—had outwardly projecting sills that established a clear third-dimensional axis. Its stepped footprint occupied two distinct, vertical planes. Most importantly, Grey window wall was freestanding, the consequences of which were clear to Mangold: Gray window wall was constructed to sit directly on the floor—it was one of the few works I did at this time that this was true of. It was crossing the border between painting and sculpture. Once you begin standing paintings on the floor, they are no longer paintings.52 His work was beginning to assume environmental proportions, in some cases even using adjoining perpendicular planes to create corners.53 Instead of just mimicking walls, they were adopting their architectural function of containing space. Sensing the direction his work was leading him, Mangold concurrently created the dialectical counterpoint to this sculptural tendency. The result was Red Wall, a work that was “flatter than anything else I was working on, with no relief elements.”54 Red Wall and Grey window wall hung simultaneously in his studio, giving material expression to the crossroads his practice had reached. In different accounts of this episode, Mangold has described two distinct moments of clarity that instructed him on how to proceed. The first came in response to criticism, the second to art.

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Figure 2.3 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Gray window wall, oil on wood (destroyed). © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In a 1978 interview, Mangold recalled a critic’s response during a studio visit to the two directions represented on his lofts’ walls: [A] critic came down one day and he really wanted me to keep going in the threedimensional direction. He said—oh you know, those pieces were terrific, but the flat one there—he really didn’t like it at all! . . . Actually, that really clarified my mind about it. It really wasn’t just being perverse. . . . He cemented it clearly in terms of what I wanted to do.55 The critic’s response reflected the sixties’ tidal shift towards three-dimensional practices—the pull of which Mangold was just now beginning to resist: It was almost against the trend of things, because everything was going into threedimensions. Painting was becoming something else in each case, it was either becoming sculpture or was becoming theatre, it was becoming all kinds of things.56 Recognizing that his work was perhaps beginning to conform too tidily to current trends, he gravitated towards Red Wall, the work neglected by the visiting critic. This

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reaction was not purely contrarian but instead was impelled by his commitment to the “chancy experience-position” posed by an advanced art that challenged prevailing critical consensus. This unnamed visitor was not the only member of the art establishment interested in positioning the Walls within the zeitgeist. Kynaston McShine visited Mangold’s studio in connection with his preparations for Primary Structures.57 The fact that Mangold had rejected the relief mode before the exhibition opened in 1966 likely resulted in his exclusion, but given the inclusion of reliefs by Judd, Robert Smithson, and Richard Van Buren, not to mention Ellsworth Kelly’s resolutely flat Blue Disc (1963), it is not difficult to imagine a work like Grey window wall making itself at home as a Primary Structure. The second incident Mangold has described that led him to abandon the relief mode was an encounter with sculpture that forced an awareness of the full implications of three-dimensional work: As I recall, one afternoon I walked with Sol LeWitt to an exhibition at the Park Place Gallery, where a huge work of Bob Grosvenor was shown along with another painter’s work. The Grosvenor, as I remember it, came down from the ceiling like a big ‘V’ form, filling the space. It was a great piece, but as I was walking back to my studio, I felt more clear in my mind that it was painting—the flat form on the wall—that I wanted to concentrate on. It was important for me to find out what was possible for me in painting.58 The Grosvenor sculpture Mangold describes was Transoxiana (1965, fig. 2.4), which dates to this critical juncture in Mangold’s oeuvre. Though he has largely drifted out of contemporary discussions of Minimalism, Grosvenor arguably exemplified the architectural scale and phenomenological engagements of sixties sculpture more dramatically than his now more heralded contemporaries.59 Transoxiana, with its dramatic descent from the ceiling and dynamic longitudinal thrust, made a bold incursion into the viewer’s space, forcing a bodily awareness of the architectural volume it occupied. In this work, Mangold saw the full implications of a three-dimensional practice and realized his true concerns resided in painting’s native two-dimensionality: Somehow it was almost a revelation to me that the idea of a very flat work was where my interests lay. Where painting’s interest lay for me. And that it was not about a bridge between painting and sculpture and not about painting becoming a sculpture. . . . Somehow it was very important for me to understand the essential nature of what painting was, that painting was surface and that painting was edge, and the fact that painting was a flat object, was a part of its nature and was important to its nature.60 This realization was not the radical about-face it might seem. From the outset, the Walls expressed Mangold’s ambivalence about working in three dimensions. As seen in Brown Corner, projection into real space stood in tension with the paint’s optical flattening. The textural and chromatic particularities of their hardware store materials lay buried beneath an impermeable veneer of hue. The Walls did not assertively declare a literalist presence, but rather revealed and concealed in equal measure. Furthermore, Mangold’s decision should not be understood as a disavowal of an embodied mode of spectatorship in favor of a Greenbergian form

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Figure 2.4 Robert Grosvenor (b. 1937), Transoxiana, 1965, wood, polyester, steel, 10 ft. 6 in. × 31 ft. × 3 ft. (320 × 945 × 91.4 cm). Image courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery.

of opticality. As seen in Yellow Wall, the effects of Mangold’s seams, which would continue to be integral to his work, hinged on the movements of an ambulatory viewer. Indeed, his renunciation of the relief was born out of his conclusion that a two-dimensional surface possessed its own phenomenological plentitude and was thus an ideal platform for his desired mediation of the optical and literalist modes of aesthetic experience. The move from the Walls to the Areas was thus not so much a departure as a reorganization of Mangold’s original terms. Instead of flattening relief elements with paint, he made flatness a precondition, working on masonite sheets that presented a minimal profile. The Areas inverted the structural precepts of the Walls: instead of articulating positive architectural forms, they transcribed the negative spaces etched by buildings into the city’s skyline.61 This strategic shift can be observed in the changes in Mangold’s silhouettes. Gone are the Walls’ cutouts and capacious negative spaces. The Areas have a more emblematic presence, accented at the margins with subtle notchings and canted edges. Technically, they extended inquiries already underway in the earlier works. At a certain point in working on the Walls, he began to apply oil paint with a spray gun,

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a device that, in his telling, was the only way to achieve his desired degree of flatness: “I ran into a problem painting the Walls trying to get them as flat as I want, so I just succumbed to the idea of using a sprayer. I didn’t want to at first.”62 Whatever initial reluctance Mangold faced in adopting the spray gun had eased by the time he began the Areas. In these works he embraced the device’s ethereal atomization of paint, creating nearly imperceptible tonal gradations and subtle atmospheric effects. In describing the Areas, Mangold has related them to the pockets of sunsets and sunrises he observed between buildings from the roof of his Bowery loft:63 [O]ne of the things that used to fascinate me was those architectural sections between the buildings, sections of air that would glow.  .  . . Sunsets or mornings, or whatever, you’d see these incredible areas of light and they were architectural shapes and yet they were nothing, because they were the voids of architecture.64 The idea of a form that was both architectural and void readily appealed to the artist’s dialectical formalism. However, the Areas should not be confused for an earnest, pictorial naturalism. Just as the Walls applied a non-architectural, industrial palette (i.e., paper bag brown, stapler green, etc.) to architectural forms, the Areas trafficked in a similar form of dissimulation. In yet another iteration of his works’ synthetic operations, Mangold deployed atmospheric effects using decidedly unnatural colors. In Manila-Neutral Area (1965–66, Plate 5), for example, a manila envelope tan undergoes a gradual, luminous transformation that is entirely at odds with the banality of this hue. Dazzling technical effects that one longs to associate with transcendence remain locked in productive tension with the profane. Another more professionally established artist was taking similar advantage of the spray gun’s optical atmospherics at this time. By 1965, Jules Olitski had been the subject of significant praise by Greenberg and Fried.65 For Olitski, the spray gun represented unadulterated opticality, shorn of material attachments, as indicated by his stated aesthetic ideal: “[W]hat I would like in my paintings is simply a spray of color that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape.”66 To this end, he deployed the spray gun towards increasingly baroque coloristic effects intended to dazzle the eye and transcend the canvas support. Mangold was aware of Olitski’s use of sprayed paint, and the differences between these two artists’ use of the technique is instructive. In an unpublished 1965 interview with Lucy Lippard, Mangold commented on the older artist’s work: “I was very disappointed because to me, they looked very store window-ish. . . . It does seem terribly old fashioned to me, in the sense of relating to early Rothko’s and Norman Bluhm type of things.” When Lippard commented that Olitski was currently teaching at “the Greenbergian stronghold up in Bennington,” Mangold quipped, “You get careless up there.”67 To Mangold, Olitski’s paintings were soft and decorative, easy on the eye and rooted in good taste. They aped Rothko’s gauzy atmospherics but possessed none of his rigor. The Areas can thus be viewed as Mangold’s literalist updating of Rothko. The spray gun steamrolls the Abstract Expressionist’s misty fields of translucent color, resulting in an even, finely modulated paint surface. The subtle tonal gradations intimate the slightest fluctuation in pictorial depth, though this is undercut by the paint’s uniform, machine-like facture and the conspicuous materiality of the support’s emblematic

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contours. The works possess something of the mystery of Rothko’s signature paintings but refuse their existential spectacle. In the Areas, as in the Walls, Mangold holds the literal and the optical in suspension. Where many saw irreconcilable antitheses, Mangold staked out an identity for painting as both image and object, positing such a condition as the dialectical basis for what he would soon theorize as “Flat Art.”

“Flat Art”: Painting Between Object and Concept While Mangold’s paintings levied counterarguments to the emerging voices in the sculptural arena, he was not immune to the period’s pressure on artists to polemicize. By 1966, Judd’s “Specific Objects,” and the first two installments of Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture,” had appeared in major art publications. These widely discussed articles had decisively reshaped the period’s critical discourses in ways that posed significant consequences for painting. Mangold, who had always aspired to an advanced form of abstraction, was now being told by admired peers that his medium was retardataire. In 1967, he decided to enter the fray. The result was the essay “Flat Art,” which he submitted to an unnamed art journal for publication. However, when the editor suggested he expand it, he put the article aside, never to return to it.69 The imperative to publish never sat well with Mangold. As he later recalled, “Many artists were publishing articles, promoting positions that I did not share in, and I felt incapable of and embarrassed at the idea of needing to ‘publish or perish.’”70 The text would not see publication until 2000, and it remains an underappreciated yet important piece of Minimalist polemic. Richard Shiff and Nancy Princenthal have both described “Flat Art” as Mangold’s response to Morris’s phenomenological interpretation of sculpture in the first two “Notes on Sculpture” essays.71 Though this accurately addresses one facet of the article, “Flat Art” is an elliptical text that does not wholly resolve. Rather than gleaning a single, cohesive argument from it, it is more profitable to follow its tangents and examine its lacunae. It also demands consideration of another of Mangold’s key interlocutors, Sol LeWitt, whose ideas permeate the essay’s second half, though he is not named outright. “Flat Art” opens with an extended epigraph of aphorisms by Mangold and quotations from art journals. Its opening statement reads, “Most forms of art require a duration of time to complete the work.”72 Though it might appear that he is referring to the process of artistic creation, the following quotation, from Phillip Pavia’s “Polemic on One-Eye Formats,” published in ARTnews the previous year, makes it clear that he is actually referring to the temporality of spectatorship: Gertrude Stein said that one sentence cannot make a paragraph, and that prose must be articulated by means of changing verb tenses in order to command a sense of time. Only then will the reader experience the thing called a paragraph. The language of the artist is almost parallel, an artist changes his verbs, too. A paragraph with many tenses or focuses can fill experience with a complete content . . . a moving focus traveling from one point to another is the essence of plastic languages, because it lets the experience work itself to completion.73 This article was Pavia’s jeremiad against the modernist painting of Stella and Noland, particularly as it had been championed by Greenberg and Fried. He contrasts these

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artists’ “one-eyed,” “diagrammatic” stripes and chevrons with the embodied, “twoeyed” art of his first-generation New York School compatriots. Whereas the former “choked [the eye] to death in the isolated central position,” the latter posited a mobile spectator attuned to the embodied nature of sensory experience. When viewing Abstract Expressionist art, he wrote, “You must move your head back and forth, freeing your eye to allow your sensibilities to absorb whatever is happening simultaneously in your time and situation.”74 Drawing on Gertrude Stein’s description of the parallels between the temporalities of prose and plastic form, Pavia described a durational art that created meaning syntactically and in real time. That this form of spectatorship was being described by an original New York School artist, who in turn invoked such a distinguished figure in the history of painting as Stein, must have lent this passage formidable authority for Mangold. The essay follows the passage from Pavia with an enigmatic aphorism of Mangold’s own: “One thing which separates painting from other art forms is that it can be seen instantly, all at once. I think this might be called painting’s natural advantage. Painters have invented complicated systems to defeat this advantage.” The instantaneity of painting’s “natural advantage” has clear antecedents in Greenberg’s and Fried’s criticism. Given his earlier invocation of Pavia’s argument for the importance of duration in the aesthetic encounter, one must conclude that Mangold counted himself as a painter who worked to “defeat this advantage.” Indeed, as our earlier discussion of his seams demonstrated, Mangold’s paintings might be visible in one shot, but they only truly reveal themselves in time. Mangold concludes the introductory section of “Flat Art” with a passage from Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture: Part I”: A baroque figurative bronze is different from every side. So is a 6-foot cube. The constant shape of the cube held in the mind, but which the viewer never literally experiences, is an actuality against which the literal changing perspective views are related.75 These lines encapsulate Morris’s claims for sculpture as a medium that demands a temporal and embodied mode of spectatorship. Only by circumnavigating the work of sculpture is the mental impression one draws from it verified by empirical experience. Juxtaposed with the earlier passage from Pavia, it becomes apparent that Mangold wished to contrast his understanding of the act of beholding a painting with recent claims made about the spectatorship of sculpture. In certain respects, Morris was a curious target for Mangold. As discussed in the Introduction, the first two parts of “Notes on Sculpture” were by no means hostile towards painting. Morris agreed with Mangold that painting was a “Flat Art,” and it wouldn’t be until “Notes on Sculpture, Part III,” published later in 1967, that Morris would declare it to be retrograde. Where they disagreed was in their understanding of what flatness meant. For Mangold, flatness possessed all the tactility and perceptual vagaries of sculpture, and on this score, he found a compelling interlocutor in Pavia. By reaching back to the first generation of the New York School, Mangold disregarded recent critical trends to argue that the best American painting had always demanded an embodied, moving spectator. The second section of “Flat Art” begins with three quotations, which together adumbrate a case for parity between two- and three-dimensional mediums:

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Painting extends to include flat shapes and planes of all sorts. —George Kubler, The Shape of Time, 1962 Neither the theories nor the experiences of Gestalt effects relating to threedimensional bodies are as simple and clear as they are for two-dimensions. —Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture: Part I,” 1966 I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you my happy readers, who are privileged to life in Space. —Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland, 1952 By citing Kubler, Mangold attempted to engage Morris on his own intellectual terms. Kubler was a much-discussed figure in the art world of the sixties, particularly among theoretically inclined sculptors like Morris and Smithson.76 As invoked in “Flat Art,” Kubler appears to contradict Morris’s privileging of the perceptual richness of three dimensions by arguing that paintings belong to a broader class of flat objects that possess all the sensory intrigue of their three-dimensional counterparts. That it came from one of the sculptor’s own intellectual lodestars would have made this passage especially damning. However, whether knowingly or not, Mangold actually misappropriates Kubler’s text. The quotation comes from a passage in his widely read The Shape of Time, in which Kubler laments the gradual erasure of important distinctions between different classes of visual artifacts, beginning with the collapse of the distinction between fine and decorative arts that he assigns to the 19th century. The full passage that contains the sentence Mangold quotes extends this development into the 20th century: By another line of attack, “fine art” was driven out of use about 1920 by the exponents of industrial design. . . . Thus an idea of aesthetic unity came to embrace all artifacts, instead of ennobling some at the expense of others. This egalitarian doctrine of the arts nevertheless erases many important differences of substance. Architecture and packaging tend in the modern schools of design to gravitate together under the rubric of envelopes; sculpture absorbs the design of all sorts of small solids and containers; painting extends to include flat shapes and planes of all sorts, like those of weaving and printing. By this geometric system, all visible art can be classed as envelopes, solids, and planes, regardless of any relation to use, in a classing which ignores the traditional distinction by “fine” and “minor,” or “useless” and “useful.”77 For Kubler, a painting was, in fact, very different from other flat surfaces, such as weaving and printing, and in this respect, his conception of the medium arguably more closely aligned with Morris’s than Mangold’s. Indeed, one might imagine the art historian seeing Mangold’s appropriations from industry as symptomatic of the cultural conditions he describes. Mangold’s argument for inter-medium parity receives a more successful and original formulation in his quotation from Edwin A. Abott’s Flatland. Abbott was a Victorian-era educator and theologian, who wrote on a variety of subjects, from grammar, to the philosopher Francis Bacon, to biblical exegesis. However, he owes his enduring legacy to Flatland, published anonymously in 1884, a deeply strange,

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proto-science fictional novella, that reads as part social parody and part mathematical treatise. It tells the story of a two-dimensional realm populated by polygonal characters, as narrated by its protagonist, A Square. The story’s first half parodies Victorian social conventions. Characters’ gender and social status are expressed outwardly by their number of sides and geometric regularity: women are lines, laborers are isosceles triangles, gentlemen are squares and polygons, and so on. Flatland’s second half becomes a gripping mathematical parable, when A Square receives a visit from the extra-dimensional Sphere, who lifts him out of his planar existence and into the wonder of Spaceland. Applied to the context of the art world of the sixties, Flatland reads like an allegory of the decade’s medium-related anxieties. A Square’s wonderment upon receiving the “Gospel of Three Dimensions” echoes the missionary zeal of artists like Judd and Morris in their advocacy of sculptural practices. Flatland’s myopic planarity seemingly cannot compete with a fully spatial existence. And yet, in Abbott’s telling, threedimensional space also has its limitations. After his initial excitement with Spaceland fades, A Square inquires about the nature of four-dimensional experience. The Sphere acknowledges that some have conjectured as to the existence of such a realm, but he quickly loses patience with this heretical line of inquiry and banishes A Square back to two dimensions, where he lives a life in exile as a “Flatland Prometheus.”78 However, the Sphere also leads a benighted existence. Unable or unwilling to acknowledge the limitations of his own spatial coordinates, he remains blinded by a false sense of superiority. In the context of “Flat Art,” Flatland deftly satirizes the critical pretensions of much Minimalist polemic, particularly its claims about the inherent superiority of particular mediums and materials. Other passages in “Flat Art” offer insights onto the artist’s practice that reveal his sense of kinship with contemporaneous object-oriented practices. In one aphorism, he writes, “Some artists, while working in an area which is the historical extension of Painting or Sculpture, find little or no connection with the traditional skills, attitudes, etc. associated with the terms.” This statement particularly resonates with Mangold’s practice at the time of the Walls and Areas, in which the application of paint had become a straightforward affair, lacking any of the Sturm und Drang of a stereotypical studio practice. As he told Lippard in 1965: The kind of old feeling of . . . I’m not really being sentimental about it . . . the old feeling of every other day you start a new painting, or one would come off and one would come on. There would be an excitement about it, about things constantly happening on canvas . . . and now it’s really limited to a very few hours of the month maybe where I’m actually painting and the rest of the time is spent getting ready for that little bit of a performance.79 Elsewhere he likened his painting process to the act of printing in printmaking, saying, “[I]t’s just something that’s needed to arrive at the work.”80 Like his sculptor peers, the bulk of Mangold’s practice was occupied with selecting materials and colors and conceiving the shape of his supports. In comparison to these preparatory efforts, the act of painting was a matter of routine—a “performance.” Though his essay sought to define the nature of a “Flat Art,” he never intended this category to be a Greenbergian border patrol between the mediums. One could pursue a two-dimensional practice and still participate in developments in other artistic arenas.

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Mangold’s sense of kinship with his object-making peers is best evidenced by comparing “Walls and Areas” with another exhibition of that same year, Sol LeWitt’s debut at John Daniels Gallery. LeWitt was one of Mangold’s closest friends in the sixties (LeWitt, too, had been a MoMA guard), and the two artists frequented one another’s studios, which were located two blocks apart from one another on the Lower East Side.81 They worked on their respective exhibitions concomitantly, and each would assuredly have seen the other’s work in progress. LeWitt’s consisted of a series of roomscaled, quasi-architectural objects composed of plywood slabs joined at right or obtuse angles and painted with a glossy industrial lacquer, each a different color (fig. 2.5). With their lumberyard materials and non-artist paints, these works shared much with Mangold’s Walls in particular. Both invoked an architectural vernacular to formulate a hybrid of painting and sculpture, drawing inspiration specifically from the built environment of New York City.82 Whereas Mangold’s Walls appropriated fragments of architectural interiors, LeWitt’s structures mimicked the imposing, reflective volumes of its skyline. In both exhibitions, these borrowings from architecture served to activate the gallery interior: Mangold’s cutouts incorporated expanses of the supporting wall into the work; LeWitt’s structures fit snugly into the gallery’s narrow dimensions, creating an immersive, interactive environment for the viewer.83 While these exhibitions represented important turning points for each artist—Mangold’s cemented his embrace of painting’s flatness, while LeWitt’s foreshadowed the engagements with viewer perception and exhibition conditions that would characterize his mature conceptual sculpture—a viewer in 1965 who attended both exhibitions would have justifiably walked away thinking that the two artists were exploring similar territory.84

Figure 2.5 Installation view, Sol LeWitt, John Daniels Gallery, New York, May 4–29, 1965. Photograph courtesy of LeWitt Estate. © 2018 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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LeWitt’s significance for Mangold resurfaces later in “Flat Art,” when he discusses the issue of seriality, or what he refers to as “multi-view art”: Flat art, or art with only one view, includes paintings and flat surface works of any type, prints, drawings, photographs, etc., but not, however, serial or sequential works that require an adding-up of separate parts, where the total work is never seen, in complete form, from one view. Multi-view art would include sculpture and all types of three-dimensional work whose total is a composite of many views, such as film, environmental art and the type of serial or sequential works described above.85 Here, Mangold contemplates the possibility of a conceptual mode of serial painting, in which a work’s statement unfolds across multiple canvases. The “Flat Art” essay dates from a time when Mangold was actively deliberating over the implications of such a practice. In 1965, the Mangolds had summered at Al Held’s farm in Boiceville, New York, and Robert, who had recently been drawing inspiration for his Areas from the negative spaces in the city’s skyline, was struck by the vastly different vistas that now confronted him in the country. At this point, he began making his first Curved Areas, which featured downward-facing arcs that echoed the valleys he observed on the rural horizon. While these works were ostensibly drawn from nature, Mangold quickly realized that the curve introduced the external conceptual framework of geometry that could be a source of additional compositional complexity.86 For example, compare 1/3 Gray-Green Curved Area (fig. 2.6) and Gray-Green Quarter Circle (1966,

Figure 2.6 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), 1/3 Gray-Green Curved Area, 1966, oil on masonite, two panels, 48 × 83 3/4 in. (121.9 × 212.7 cm) overall. The Solomon R. Guggenhim Museum. Panza Collection, 1991. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 2.7 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Gray-Green Quarter Circle, acrylic on masonite, 14 × 14 in. (35.6 × 35.6 cm). Collection of the Sol LeWitt Estate. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

fig. 2.7). Both feature a vertically sectioned segment of a circle. However, the former is vertically bisected by the seam between two Masonite panels that falls on the radial axis of symmetry, yielding two identical sub-segments, whereas in the latter, a vertically drawn line disrupts the arc of a quarter circle, producing two irregular sections that jar against one’s perception of the larger form. Like the earlier Walls, these paintings are fragments of a non-existent whole, but unlike those works, one can readily deduce the complete form from which they were derived. “A beautiful thing about a quarter circle,” Mangold stated in 1993, “is that it is a fragment that implies a circle, but is also a complete thing in itself.”87 He exhibited this body of work in his followup exhibition at Fischbach in 1967. These paintings, even more than the Walls and Areas, thematized their sectioning, which now functioned as an overarching logic for the entire exhibition, inviting consideration of each work’s relationship to their shared originating form. While Mangold conceived each painting to be a standalone aesthetic entity, the exhibition nonetheless tied the legibility of the individual works to one’s experience of the group. Such was the impression of James Mellow, who wrote in Art International, “[O]ne has to see the work in series, or in several variations, in order to catch the inference about the overriding circular form.”88 At the time he wrote “Flat Art,” which dates from the same year as this exhibition, Mangold appeared to harbor doubts about the implications posed by this body of work. As he argues in the essay, flat art could be seen in “one view” and thus did not include “serial or sequential

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works that require an adding-up of separate parts.”89 Such work was the purview of sculpture, film, or installation, but not, he maintained, painting—despite his own work’s suggesting otherwise. However, by the following year, Mangold must have had a change of heart, as he began his W, V, X series, which openly embraced a “multi-view” form of spectatorship. These paintings continued the earlier Areas’ sectioning of the half-circle, using both vertical and diagonal divisions in one of three formats that configured the series’ eponymous letters. As indicated in a 1970 drawing that documents the series in its entirety, he derived each individual entry in the series by applying one of four types of segmenting to the parent form—“¼ [circle],” “central vertical,” “central diagonal (asymmetric),” and “central diagonal (symmetric)” (fig. 2.8) These series were Mangold’s first to feature both drawn lines and panel seams within a single painting, and they played on the optical ambiguity between the two. For example, diagonal lines that were drawn in the half-circle paintings become physical edges in the “central diagonal” iterations (fig. 2.9). In these works, the schema behind the sectioning was much more complex than that of the earlier Curved Areas, which likely prompted Mangold to include the smaller scale models of the complete series on a single wall as a kind of key when he exhibited them at Fischbach in 1969. Reviewing this exhibition in Artforum, Emily Wasserman expressed misgivings about the aesthetic integrity of the individual paintings similar to those voiced by Mangold in “Flat Art” two years prior: Relationships between each unit in the series become apparent only when viewing the whole wall of models, (since only parts of the three series were exhibited on large scale), but the energy obtained from this collective grouping seemed to me sadly lacking in most of the single full-sized works, whose interior activation does not always manage to override their generally dry conceptuality.90 Wasserman rightly notes the newfound significance for Mangold of the series’ underlying schema, outside of which the individual paintings cannot be fully comprehended, as each work functions as an integer in the expression of its broader conceptual parameters. Once more, LeWitt emerges as Mangold’s key interlocutor. The W, V, X series share the conceptually motivated, permutational methodology of the former’s mature serial works, such as Serial Project #1 (ABCD) of 1966 (fig. 2.10), in which he systematically realized every combination of two different geometric forms, one placed inside the other, in both open and closed variations and at three different heights. In “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (published in 1967, the same year Mangold wrote “Flat Art”), LeWitt theorized this new turn in his practice: In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.91 The W, V, X series are similarly the product of a preconceived schema, as Mangold faithfully derived every unique form from his four types of segmenting (excluding mirror-image reversals). Once the parameters of the project were established, there were no more decisions to be made; the design of the parent half-circles and types of segmenting applied to them became the “machine” that made the art. These series share

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with LeWitt’s serial works an obsessive pursuit of mundane procedural activity that Rosalind Krauss has likened to the absurdist compulsions of the characters of Samuel Beckett.92 Indeed, the W, V, X exhibition might have initially appeared to be a logical affair, but it quickly immersed the viewer in a Beckett-esque state of irrationality and

Figure 2.8 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), WVX Series, 1970, graphite and pen and black ink on wove paper, 22 × 18 in. (55.9 × 45.7 cm). The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, Patrons’ Permanent Fund and Gift of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1991.241.88. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 2.9 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), V Series Central Diagonal 2 (Green), 1968, synthetic polymer paint on composition board in four parts, overall 48 1/4 in. × 8 ft. 1/2 in. (122.5 × 245.1 cm). Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

uncertainty. Contemplating a single painting’s specific configuration of drawn lines and panel seams while simultaneously relating it to the myriad permutations elsewhere on view would have been a neurosis-inducing task, and one can imagine viewers repeatedly shuttling from individual paintings to the wall of models to gauge their position within the overarching schema. Furthermore, the paintings’ sectioning would have sown uncertainty about one’s perception of works seen earlier in the exhibition. For example, the paintings that were diagonally sectioned, such as V Series Central Diagonal I (Green), would induce doubts about one’s recollection of the half- and quartercircle entries in the series. In these latter works, the outermost diagonal was a drawn line, whereas in the former, it was a physical panel edge. In this way, the ambiguity between lines and seams discussed earlier contributed to the paintings’ mutual obfuscation, as each new work complicated one’s grasp of those encountered previously. Mangold has acknowledged the significance of LeWitt’s practice for him during these years: Sol’s art spurred me on to greater efforts. It may or may not have worked that way for him. When Sol published his “Sentences on Conceptual Art” in 1969, they very clearly staked out his interests. These statements were not meant to point the way for all to follow, but rather act as a declaration of the position he had arrived at. It was a solid, formidable position, however, and it caused you to consider and balance your own ideas in relation to it.93 Mangold’s suggestion that his friend might have been influenced by his work deserves serious consideration, for despite their closeness during the sixties, he seldom appears as a significant figure in the voluminous critical and scholarly literature on LeWitt

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Figure 2.10 Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966, baked enamel on steel units over baked enamel on aluminum, 20 in. × 13 ft. 7 in. × 13 ft. 7 in. (50.8 × 398.9 × 398.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Agnes Gund and purchase (by exchange). Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2018 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(a lacuna that is surely attributable, to some degree, to his status as a painter). The fact that LeWitt owned an edition of Cool Gray Area with Curved Diagonal (Mangold made nine for various friends), as well as two of the preparatory works from the W, V, X series, suggests that their artistic bond was particularly tight at this juncture.94 Mangold’s first Curved Areas—which, as discussed previously, can be understood as a proto-serial body of work—may well have been an important influence in the development of LeWitt’s first exhibition of serial work at Dwan Gallery in 1966, which consisted of white cubic lattice sculptures configured in room-filling arrays (fig. 2.11). James Meyer has commented on the surprising “about-face” this exhibition represented in comparison to the structures he showed at the John Daniels Gallery the previous year.95 The Curved Areas, which Mangold began in the interim between these two exhibitions, may well have contributed to this departure, as their preoccupations with part-to-whole relationships and geometric segmenting anticipate key themes of LeWitt’s first Dwan show.96

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Figure 2.11 Installation view of Sol LeWitt one-man exhibition at Dwan Gallery, New York, 1966; Dwan Gallery (New York, NY), photographer. Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles, California and New York, New York) records, 1959–circa 1982, bulk 1959–71. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © 2018 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

If Mangold was the leading figure in his artistic dialogue with LeWitt in 1965–66, by 1967 the roles had reversed, as he began to “consider and balance” his ideas in relation to the newly theorized conceptualism of his friend’s practice. “Flat Art” expressed doubts about the implications of LeWitt’s ideas, disavowing its “multi-view” mode of spectatorship as anathema to painting, but the following year, Mangold completed an about-face of his own with the W, V, X series. However, an important point of friction remained between the two artists. In “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” LeWitt stressed that the individual modules in a conceptual work should possess little in the way of intrinsic aesthetic interest: When an artist uses a multiple modular method he usually chooses a simple and readily available form. The form itself is of very limited importance; it becomes the grammar for the total work. In fact, it is best that the basic unit be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work.97

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The squares and cubes in LeWitt’s serial structures were a neutral syntax possessing none of the material specificity of a Judd box or Andre metal tile. Their value lay solely in their expression of the schema of the larger work. The individual paintings in the W, V, X series similarly functioned in a syntactic fashion, but unlike LeWitt’s geometric modules, Mangold’s paintings exerted greater autonomy from their larger series. Each work’s unique composition of drawn lines and panel seams was a source of its own “one view” aesthetic interest, which was augmented by but did not wholly depend on the entirety of the series. Perhaps sensing the irreconcilability of this tension in his serial work between the “one view” and the “multi-view,” Mangold eventually abandoned this method of working in 1971.98 While working in series would remain a defining feature of his art from the sixties to the present, he ultimately rejected seriality as a generative mechanism for the creation of a work. Commenting on this transition, Mangold said: From roughly 1968–70 I worked with a more rigid serial intent . . . that attempted to work out all the possibilities of a given idea. The entire series could be visualized from the outset, but working this way became an uncomfortable fit. In 1971 I went back to the idea of making works that were part of a family of similar works, which is to say I made variations on an idea, and I am still working this way. For me it is a more natural way to work; the group of works ends when I feel that further variations are unnecessary, or when the particular idea is complete enough for me—not because a particular system or series has been exhausted.99 This rejection of seriality for working in series, however, should not be understood as a retreat from the avant-garde to the retardataire. Mangold’s series after 1971 differ from the more traditionally modernist practice of creating variations on a theme. Inflected by his engagements with seriality in the late sixties, his mature series are a product of specific variables (e.g., canvas shape, interior drawing, color, and facture) established by the artist in advance (fig. 2.12). While rigidly defined, these parameters allow his series to develop in a more organic fashion, as compositional choices made in one painting inform those made in subsequent ones. His series retain Conceptual art’s predetermined logic while relaxing the inexorability of its execution, which in turn focuses the viewer’s attention more fully on the single painting, whose full legibility is no longer contingent on the presence of an external schema. “Flat Art” shows 1967 to have been a pivotal year for Mangold. The essay simultaneously contends with an object-based critique of painting that had only recently cohered as a viable threat to the medium and the contiguous, newly emergent discourses of Conceptual art whose implications had yet to come fully into focus for the artist. If Mangold committed himself to painting in 1965, it was a commitment that would be continually steeled against the forces that threatened its survival. In this way, Mangold fashioned negation as a catalyst for advancement. Just as the 1965 Fischbach show sublated modernist and literalist aesthetics, his subsequent works engaged dialectically with the tenets of Conceptual art, once more bringing painting to a position of synthesis that few of his contemporaries thought possible.

“Just Nothing,” “Minimal,” “Third Stream” Mangold’s other key interlocutor in the sixties was Lucy Lippard. Although her art criticism from this period is today best remembered for its pioneering advocacy of

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Figure 2.12 Installation view, Robert Mangold: Column Structure Paintings, Pace Wildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, February 9–March 10, 2007. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery.

conceptual and feminist practices, Lippard was also the decade’s foremost critic to defend painting’s analogue to the Minimalist object. Mangold’s work often served as her chief exemplar in these efforts. By the time of Walls and Areas, Lippard was an established and prolific critic and regular author of Art International’s “New York Letter.” Her support announced Mangold as a well-connected member of the city’s rising generation of artistic talent, and her essay printed on the back of the exhibition’s announcement postcard (cut in the shape of Red Wall), framed many critics’ understanding of his early work. Between 1965–67, she would write in depth about his work in three ambitious essays about painting and include him in the 1967 exhibition, Focus on Light, co-curated with Richard Bellamy at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Lippard’s close social ties with Mangold afforded her unrivaled personal access to the artist, and consequently, many of his most illuminating comments about his work in the sixties appeared in her texts. These essays featuring Mangold tend to be overshadowed in the art historical literature by her later critical writings advocating for practices now commonly deemed more radical, but they nonetheless constitute an important contribution to the discourses of Minimalism, as they represent the period’s most sustained and sophisticated attempt to secure painting’s viability within the movement by one of its leading critics.100 Complicating these efforts was the example of Clement Greenberg. Like any serious New York critic in the sixties, Lippard had to contend with the powerful precedent established by his corpus, later describing him as “the monkey I had to kick off my back.”101 While she was never under his thrall to the degree of other younger critics like Rosalind Krauss or Michael Fried, her essays on Mangold reflect a sophisticated

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understanding of his criticism, particularly in their adaptation of his teleological model of abstract painting’s development as formulated in “Modernist Painting.” The strains that resulted from applying this critical model to work that was, in many respects, anathema to it reflect painting’s contested status at this moment. Competing and often antithetical critical impulses coexist in Lippard’s essays, yielding arguments that are perhaps inevitably not fully resolved. The expressionist legacy of fifties painting, Greenberg’s modernist formalism, and the insurgent literalism of the sixties all inform Lippard’s account of Mangold’s art, and her responsiveness to these competing tendencies makes her essays illuminating in assessing not only Mangold’s position within Minimalism but also the predicament the movement posed for the medium more broadly. Lippard, like other writers reviewing Walls and Areas, readily identified the “minimal” as a key trope in Mangold’s work. Though few used precisely that term—Richard Wollheim’s “Minimal Art” had only recently introduced it to the critical discourse earlier that year—reviewers uniformly seized on the paintings’ austerity as their most salient feature, though not all viewed it as favorably as Lippard.102 John Canaday, for example, writing in the New York Times, viewed the exhibition as an exercise in misbegotten asceticism: There is perhaps great purity to these flat wall-size areas very slightly, almost imperceptibly, graded in color, but purity can only go so far before it becomes just nothing. These efforts are just nothing, although they might serve to illustrate some esoteric verbal premises.103 Conflating the two bodies of work on view (“wall-size areas”), Canaday saw Mangold’s paintings as modernist formalism run amok. Purging all that was extraneous, they inadvertently voided themselves of aesthetic value, resulting in a “purity” that was ultimately “nothing.” His reference to purity may have been prompted by Lippard’s exhibition announcement essay, which related Mangold’s “‘purism’ and ‘poetry’” to the work of Ad Reinhardt,104 an artist Canaday had dismissed in similarly uncharitable language five years prior.105 His review again raises Meyer’s twofold notion of the minimal as it appeared in early sixties criticism. Like Kramer and Kay reviewing “Systemic Painting,” Canaday arrived at two related, negative aesthetic judgments. First, in their radical formal expurgation, Mangold’s paintings exceeded a critical threshold, forsaking their identity as art and becoming “just nothing,” or to use Meyer’s phrase, “not-art-enough.” Absent any sensuous merit, Canaday could only imagine a conceptual premise justifying the existence of such impoverished objects, thus pointing towards Meyer’s second meaning of the minimal: [H]ow far could this tendency toward reduction go? When would one arrive, in painting, at the monochrome or bare canvas, in sculpture, at the readymade? For as the technical bravura and compositional and coloristic excess of ’10th Street’ lost credibility, the concept embodied by the work took precedence.106 This conceptual aspect to the minimal, as described by Meyer, is a dada-ist gesture: “the spectre of Duchamp, imploding the modernist tradition of formal abstraction from within.”107 While Dada’s return in the sixties would inform some writers’ responses to Walls and Areas, Canaday’s ire—like Kramer and Kay’s—was more likely directed

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at what he perceived to be the untoward influence of modernist criticism on younger artists, hence his characterization of Mangold as an “illustrator” of a priori “esoteric verbal premises.”108 More sympathetic critics viewed the Walls and Areas as a unique and significant entry to the burgeoning Minimalist field, itself a critical construction still very much in the process of being parsed. David Bourdon, writing in the Village Voice, perceptively commented on the Walls’ “suitably casual . . . carpentry” and the Areas’ “Rothkoesque aura.”109 Sensing Mangold’s kinship with his peers and art of the recent past, Bourdon placed him in what he saw as a reductionist trend that had its roots in the art of the fifties: “The work is not so reductive as to preclude hints of Newman, Rothko, Reinhardt, Stella, and Morris. But [sic] I didn’t think there was much room left in ‘minimal’ art and Mangold proves there is.”110 The quotation marks that bracket Bourdon’s “minimal” signal his awareness of Wollheim’s essay, as does his understanding of Minimalism as an attenuated field of increasingly rarefied aesthetic possibilities. Wollheim had sought to furnish philosophical justification for the limiting conditions of modernist art: the readymade and the monochrome, discussed previously as the endgame coordinates of Meyer’s “minimal.”111 Using Reinhardt’s black paintings as his exemplar of the monochrome (however ill-advisedly), he described them as the “ultimate degree” manifestation of the destructive energies intrinsic to artistic creativity that had driven visual art from figuration to abstraction. For Wollheim, Reinhardt’s black paintings brought the annihilation of the mimetic tradition to its terminus: “Within these canvases the work of destruction has been ruthlessly complete, and any image has been so thoroughly dismantled that no pentimenti any longer remain.”112 Bracketing the obvious objections Reinhardt would have raised to this characterization of his practice, Wollheim’s account is notable for how it posits the monochrome as a destructive enterprise that asymptotically approaches the readymade bare canvas. For Wollheim, appreciating the monochrome’s ever-receding aesthetic virtues required an acute sensitivity to the infinitesimal material differentiation of its surface: It was by means of a very large number of nonrepetitive brush-strokes that the highly individuated masterpieces of Van Eyck or Poussin were brought into being. But in the phase I am considering, where work of this kind recedes into the background and the elements of decision or dismantling acquire a new prominence, the claim of the work of art to individual attention comes to rest increasingly upon its mere numerical diversity.113 However, even Wollheim saw his argument as tenuous and provisional and could foresee the monochrome’s eventual collapse into the readymade: Inevitably a point will be reached where this claim, which is so abstractly couched, can no longer be found acceptable, or even taken seriously. But until then, as we merely move closer into the area of bare uniqueness, we have progressively brought home to us single objects for and in themselves.114 Bourdon’s description of Mangold reflects his assimilation of Wollheim’s argument, as he situates the artist in a highly circumscribed trend nearing the point of diminishing returns. Mangold eked out a niche where Bourdon previously “didn’t think there was much room left.” Like Wollheim, he saw the monochrome as the product of an

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advancing reductionism, one in which Mangold partook, but not so radically as to “preclude hints” of such relevant touchstones as “Newman, Rothko, Reinhardt, Stella, and Morris.” This notion of Minimalism as an attenuated phenomenon—an imminent foreclosure of the aesthetic by the unaesthetic—would resurface in Lippard’s writings on Mangold, though via a slightly different logic. Lippard’s first mention of Mangold’s mature work appeared in a sprawling article published in Art Voices in the spring of 1965, titled “The Third Stream: Constructed Paintings and Painted Structures.”115 In this seldom discussed yet remarkably revealing text, Lippard attempted an ambitious account of recent developments in abstract painting and sculpture, with, as the title suggests, a particular focus on the increasingly blurred boundaries between painting and sculpture. Anticipating Judd’s oft-quoted remark about “the best new work” in “Specific Objects,” published just months later, Lippard opens by asking: When is a painting not a painting, a sculpture not a sculpture? The boundaries between traditionally understood media are becoming increasingly difficult to define with the advent of a group of young non-objective artists who are strongly denying the existence of any such boundaries.116 In what follows, Lippard advances an argument that, to a significant degree, prefigures Judd’s. Citing a wealth of precursors, from Neo-Dada (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg), to Pop (Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselman, et al.), to a variety of Europeans (Lucio Fontana, Emilio Vedova, Manuel Millares), she charts modernist painting’s “progression up to and out of the picture plane.” Like Judd, she considered Stella’s striped paintings to be of pivotal importance to this growing emphasis on the object quality of painting.117 Despite their shared premise, Lippard’s analysis departs sharply from Judd’s. Whereas Judd, who had no interest in movementmaking, saw the inexorable march into three dimensions as initiating an age of aesthetic heterogeneity adjudicated purely by “interest,” Lippard’s formalism prompted her to identify a set of related practices that characterized the most advanced art of the mid-sixties: This is an art of direct confrontation, neither assemblagist nor constructivist in nature. The work discussed here has in common a single or reduced image (or no image at all), a limited or monochrome palette—often in brilliant hues, a stringent coherence, a paint quality that forgoes gesture . . . and a strong emphasis on structural rather than pictorial qualities.118 Lippard saw several imbricated subcategories falling under this general rubric: “flat but non-rectangular canvases” (Stella, Neil Williams, Paul Feeley, Edwin Ruda, and many others); “monochrome hanging wood or metal pieces” (Mangold, Judd); “freestanding boxy monochrome or near-monochrome structures without base or pedestal” (Judd, Morris, LeWitt, Walter De Maria, Anne Truitt); to name only a few. She finesses formal differences, locating each artist on a spectrum of objecthood that stretches from the painterly to the sculptural. The essay casts a wide net, yoking a diverse and often mutually antagonistic collection of practices into her so-called “third stream.” Yet if Lippard fudged certain critical distinctions for the sake of her broader argument, her comprehensive awareness of the contemporary scene cannot

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be denied. The essay mentions numerous artists who have largely, if not completely, dropped out of contemporary discussions of the period (Sven Lukin, Charles Hinman, Frank Lincoln Viner, etc.) and is a valuable reminder of the sheer scope of the aesthetic field that would eventually be distilled to what is now known as Minimalism. Lippard did recognize that formal similarities could belie critical differences among artists, yet this did not prevent her from drawing overarching conclusions about the work under consideration.119 Most compelling for her was its relationship to the realm of industry: Like a great many young artists, these men admire the technological advances of the commercial and engineering world. They find in modern technology and industrial techniques an admirable dissociation from sentimentality, from the pretty, the decadent “sensitivity” and “good taste” of much American and European academic abstraction.120 Mangold figured prominently here. She wrote the essay at a time when the Walls were probing steadily deeper into three dimensions, and his work illustrated just how far “out of the picture plane” painting had progressed, becoming a form of relief that verged on the architectural.121 She acknowledged Mangold’s appropriations from popular culture and industry, commenting on the “industrial sources” of his palette and formal vocabulary, the latter of which she described as “openly [referring] to prefabricated architecture.” Lippard saw this unsentimental technophilia as a welcome alternative to the “emotional excesses of the Abstract Expressionist hangers-on,” yet her understanding of it remained tethered to art of the previous decade: No longer veiled in myth, purged by Pop Art, the assault of commercialism on the American eye can be used without any associational context. It follows that the much-mentioned “impersonalism” of so-called cool art is not impersonalism at all, but a new kind of personalism. Art is always personal. A determined detachment is just as personal as a gut-spilling expressionism.122 Here, Lippard effectively claimed the new art as expressionism by other means. While her account of its formal mechanics represented a literalist revision of Greenberg’s modernist teleology, her description of its meaning updated the psychic dramas of Rosenberg’s Action painter for the cool sixties. As we have seen, this would not be the only time that Rosenberg’s legacy shaded the reception of Minimalist painting. Lippard’s “Art is always personal” anticipated Alloway’s “A system is as human as a splash of paint” written the following year. However, by the time Alloway weighed in on this work, Lippard had renounced this humanist stance. As with Alloway’s Systemic Painting essay, fault lines emerged in “The Third Stream” along its competing discourses’ points of friction. Lippard’s counterfactual assertion that Pop had somehow divested popular culture of its commercial referents—thus safeguarding her artists from the trappings of kitsch and the readymade—would have rankled an artist like Mangold who openly courted the “associational context” she denies. The “Third Stream” neutralizes the Wall’s Pop elements, treating them as a purely formal—or even expressive—device. This tension between the paintings’ mass cultural references and Lippard’s modernist critical framework would persist in the subsequent essays she would write about Mangold’s work.

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Prefabricated Architecture and Decorator Colors If Lippard struggled with Mangold’s borrowings from industry, the language she used for this topic was remarkably suggestive. Especially curious was her reference to “prefabricated architecture”—which would recur in her two subsequent essays—as it is not a topic that appears in any of the artist’s own comments about the Walls. Given their patently handmade construction, idiosyncratic cropping, and non-architectural palette, it is indeed difficult to imagine Mangold identifying with such a conceit. In truth, the Walls had more in common with the do-it-yourself handiwork endemic to downtown loft living, in which wall-building was one of the most common forms of interior renovation.123 As a denizen of that world herself, it is peculiar that Lippard failed to recognize their more proximate antecedents, though she was not the only critic to struggle with Mangold’s borrowings from industry. The misprisions that would arise from this issue in her and others’ commentary shed light on one of the key critical tensions regarding abstract painting’s status in the age of mass consumerism. Lippard would modify subsequent comparisons of Mangold’s work to prefabricated architecture. The Walls and Areas exhibition announcement backpedaled slightly from “The Third Stream,” now stating that the Walls only “obliquely” (rather than “openly”) made this reference.124 However, in “The Implications of Monochrome,” published in 1966, she overreached, linking his earlier paintings to “two-tone slum hallways,” while the newer, monochrome Walls quoted the “prefabricated walls of new apartment buildings”125—as if Mangold were climbing socioeconomic strata with each subsequent series. Though the comparison was strained, it pointed to the class connotations that inhered to discussions of prefabrication in the United States in the sixties. Lippard’s mention of prefabricated apartment building architecture is curious and suggests some confusion on her part regarding the use of prefabrication in building practices at this time. By the mid-sixties, prefabrication was much more widely associated with suburban single-family home building than it was with urban apartment construction, which lagged in comparison in its use of large-format, prefabricated components.126 The immediate success and startling mass uniformity of planned communities like Levittown on Long Island (founded in 1947) lent prefabricated homes significant notoriety, spawning sub-genres of fiction and cultural criticism documenting their deleterious effects on middle-class America. These discourses of popular fiction and mainstream journalistic criticism would have framed Lippard’s and her readers’ understanding of prefabricated architecture and thus warrant a brief digression. Prefabrication emerged as a solution to the widespread housing shortage crisis that the United States faced in the immediate aftermath of World War II.127 A home-building industry that had gone dormant during wartime combined with rapidly rising marriage and birth rates and a generation of returning troops had left millions of Americans in substandard, overcrowded, or temporary housing. The federal government responded by underwriting a massive new construction program, regularly approving billions of dollars in mortgage insurance for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) over the following decade. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act established a Veterans Administration mortgage program similar to the FHA’s, sanctioning the official view that the nation’s 16 million returning GIs were to be assimilated into the normative ranks of middle-class homeownership. The construction industry responded to the abundance of federally backed mortgage dollars with an unprecedented building spree, as

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single-family housing starts surged from a meager 114,000 in 1944 to 1,692,000 in 1950. These developments prompted Lizabeth Cohen, in her history of postwar American consumerism, to describe the suburban home as the consummate Pop object: “[T]he suburban home itself became the . . . quintessential mass consumer commodity, capable of fueling the fires of the postwar economy while also improving the standard of living of the mass of Americans.”128 Furthermore, this housing boom dramatically reshaped the home construction industry, which previously consisted primarily of small builders who relied heavily on subcontractors but soon transformed into a field dominated by high-volume companies that employed Taylorized production methods and handled nearly all elements of a job in-house. No firm capitalized on these developments in as spectacular a fashion as Levitt and Sons, whose signature project Levittown, founded in 1947, was the largest private housing development in American history and would soon be widely imitated across the country. By the mid-fifties and continuing well into the following decade, critics weighed in on the transformation that Levittown and its ilk had wrought on the suburban landscape and the lives of its inhabitants. Many lamented prefabrication’s merciless homogenization of the built environment. The freshly bulldozed ground, evenly punctuated with identical homes and dotted with saplings, created the impression that these communities had rolled off an assembly line, an image famously evoked by Malvina Reynolds’ 1962 counter-culture anthem, “Little Boxes,” which sardonically rhapsodized about their mass uniformity and “ticky tacky” construction. Architecture critics bemoaned that the values of traditional craftsmanship had been sacrificed at the altar of capitalist mass production. “The suburbs are a mess,” exclaimed the title of Architecture Forum editor Peter Blake’s article in The Saturday Evening Post. Their developers, he claimed, “are fundamentally no different from the manufacturers of any other mass-produced product. They standardize the product, package it, arrange for rapid distribution and easy financing, and sell it off the shelf as fast as they can.”129 Writing in the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable’s outlook was similarly dire: What the American house buyer is offered, with distressingly few exceptions, is a poor product of market-tested minimums. . . . The suburban builder has succeeded in carrying off a truly formidable feat—the standardization of America on a surprisingly low level.130 The consequences of this accomplishment extended well beyond the realm of architecture, however. “The damage from all this,” Huxtable cautioned, “is social, cultural, psychological, and emotional, as well as [a]esthetic.”131 While Huxtable did not further elaborate on this foreboding assessment, other writers chronicled these additional categories of abuse. Novelists such as Sloan Wilson (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 1955), Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road, 1961), and John Keats (The Crack in the Picture Window, 1956) fashioned suburban ennui— the financial pressures, nosy neighbors, career dissatisfaction, domestic drudgery, and extramarital affairs—into the well-worn literary trope that it is today. William H. Whyte, Jr.’s best-selling The Organization Man (1956), which documented the new managerial class that arose within postwar corporate capitalism, devoted nearly onethird of its pages to the planned Chicago suburb of Park Forest. Whyte described this class’s adherence to a new, collectivist “Social Ethic” that militated against the individualism of the Protestant Ethic, which had heretofore served as the backbone of

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the American character. In the “package suburbs,” which served as the “dormitories” of the Organization Man, Whyte observed a “community made in his image,” whose members lived “imprisoned in brotherhood,” victims of an oppressive and inescapable pressure to participate in and conform to the life of the group.132 The academic and social critic, Lewis Mumford, in his National Book Award–winning The City in History: Its Origin, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects, also saw mass conformity as the most grievous consequence of the prefabricated suburbs, but where Whyte understood it to be the result of the social pressures that arose from the suburbs’ lack of privacy, Mumford saw it as a product of mass consumerism’s totalizing homogenization of society: In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was produced . . .: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus, the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our own time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.133 Prefabricated architecture thus would have had readily understood connotations to Lippard’s urban readers (even with her one peculiar reference to it as an urban rather than suburban phenomenon). By relating Mangold’s works to prefabrication, she and other critics invoked what many had come to view as one of modern industrial capitalism’s most pernicious products—one that was aggressively desecrating the American landscape and devaluing everyday life. Nor would Lippard be the only member of the New York art world to relate prefabrication to recent trends in advanced abstraction. In the years that followed Walls and Areas, Robert Smithson and Dan Graham published photo-text pieces that compared the modularity of suburban construction to the serial strategies deployed by Minimalist sculptors. Smithson’s “The Crystal Land” of 1966 recounted his rock-hunting expedition in New Jersey with Donald Judd, in which he encountered a view of a middle-class housing development from the top of a quarry cliff. From that vantage, the houses appeared as garishly colored “tiny boxlike arrangements,” a characterization that could also describe his travel companion’s sculptures.134 The following year, Graham’s “Homes for America,” published in Arts Magazine, drew a similar comparison. While ostensibly an analysis of suburban tract housing, its photographs of rigorously repeated Cape Cods and description of the permutational sequencing of house models in an eight-unit block (“AABBCCDD, AABBDDCC, AACCBBDD . . .”) unmistakably recalled the serial compositions found in the art of his peers.135 Where Smithson posited Judd and the suburbs as diverse manifestations of what he saw as the underlying crystalline structure of the modern world,136 Graham drew out the unwitting resemblance between the strategies of Minimalist art and the logic of mass production.137 Both essays blurred cultural categories, but they did so obliquely or by analogy. Lippard, on the other hand, suggested that Mangold’s paintings actually looked like the components of prefabrication, an alarming statement to make about a painting in 1965. An abstract painting that resembled prefabricated architecture represented a radical reversal of high and low—a breach

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of advanced art’s bulwark against the machinations of mass culture. Although such an incursion was already well underway from the precincts of Pop art, it would have been especially troubling coming under the guise of modernist abstraction, as if Mangold’s paintings were a Trojan horse undermining art’s sanctity from within. This scrambling of cultural hierarchies was particularly evident in critics’ descriptions of Mangold’s palette. Reviews of Walls and Areas often commented on the “decorative” quality of his colors. This term first appeared in Lippard’s exhibition announcement, in which she wrote, “Mangold’s colors are often the insipid nearpastels dear to institutional interior decorators, and his present palette, pale but intense, if less blatantly non-artistic, still exudes a certain vulgarity.”138 Other critics parroted this terminology. David Bourdon wrote of the “flat interior paint in the most banal decorator colors.”139 Michael Benedikt commented on “the relentless dreariness of the decorator-dead pastel colors on the wall.”140 William Berkson unfavorably compared the work to a “decorator’s wall . . . [whose] scale . . . is as intimate as a tile sample.”141 This recurrence is particularly striking in light of the non-architectural sources (the green stapler, the brown paper bag, manila folder, etc.) of Mangold’s palette and his stated ambition for a “return to an antidecorative difficult art.” By viewing the works as fragments of prefabricated domestic interiors, critics conflated his palette’s diverse commercial commodity antecedents with the paintings’ architectonic silhouettes, eliding their referential eclecticism in the process. However, their terminology was understandable given that many at this time recognized that prefabricated architecture and the commercial field of interior decoration were mutually related phenomena. Suburban homeowners compensated for the mass homogeneity of the exteriors of their homes by making their interiors all the more distinctive. “The standardized house,” reported Harry Henderson in Harper’s in 1953, “creates an emphasis on interior decorating. Most people try hard to achieve ‘something different.’ In hundreds of houses, I never saw two interiors that matched.”142 Increasingly, this emphasis on decoration led homeowners to enlist the aid of a professional or to consult the many popular housekeeping periodicals of the day. As Russell Lynes wrote in The Taste-Makers (1954), his acerbic study of postwar American popular taste: So the housewife is not only urged to express her personality but to do so with her eye on good taste. Since, if she is normal, she probably has no very clear idea of what her personality is and an even vaguer idea of what good taste is, she is up against a problem with two unknowns. Unable to resolve the equation for herself she seeks help. She turns to the people who are supposed to know about such matters, the experts on taste. . . . She turns to a decorator (or if she can’t afford that, to a decorating magazine) who not only makes up a personality for her but then expresses it according to his private formula for good taste.143 Interior decoration was thus understood as a kind of consumerist expressionism, in which buyers asserted their identities through their unique combination of items purchased out of the pages of Better Homes and Gardens or their decorator’s catalogue. The critics’ charge of the decorative could also have stemmed from the material sourcing of Mangold’s paint. Like many painters of his generation, Mangold avoided art supply stores, instead preferring commercial paints. “Everyone was shopping on Canal Street,” he recalled of this period, referring to the downtown corridor of industrial wholesalers.144 To these artists, commercial paints not only had a stridently

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non-arty look but also offered a greater chromatic range than traditional fine art paints. The painter Walter Darby Bannard described this shift in his 1966 Artforum article, “Color, Paint, and Present-Day Painting.” “Most paintings .  .  . contain the same 30 or 40 colors,” he wrote. “In effect .  .  . the color range is set by the company from which [the painter] buys his paints.”145 Because mixing new colors was “expensive . . . very tedious . . . and very frustrating,” most painters depended on this predetermined selection, using “colors much as they come from the jar.”146 Tired of this limited palette and uninterested in mixing his own colors, Bannard discovered an appealing alternative: Then I noticed that the hardware store from which I bought my white paint had a large range of “decorator” colors in quart cans and a color chart to go with them. Also I found that it was possible to select from a bank of about 200 color chips any color, which would be mixed by the paint salesman. He would use a can of base vehicle and pigment from tubes mixed according to the formula printed on the chip.147 The paint-mixing machines used by commercial firms “could mix virtually any color in any amount quickly, easily, and cheaply, thereby offering decorators and do-ityourselfers an extremely sophisticated system of color selection, more complex than that of any art paint company.”148 Ironically, these so-called decorators’ colors offered painters like Bannard and Mangold artistic freedoms that fine art paints could not. Whereas the former allowed them nearly limitless chromatic possibilities, the latter had come to seem staid and restrictive. If he risked being accused of debasing art by mining the materials of kitsch, he could have responded that high art—once a sacrosanct bastion of creative autonomy—was equally, if not more, beholden to the readymade.149 Fine art paints had acquired a readily identifiable look that was wholly determined by their manufacturers. In this respect, a painter in an art supply store had become little different from the suburban housewife selecting the color of her dining room from a decorator’s catalogue. Not only did commercial paints offer a fresh alternative to the familiar hues gracing the canvases on so many gallery walls, but the artists who embraced this new world of color delighted in the transgression it subtended. Sarah K. Rich has eloquently described this phenomenon, in which modernist abstraction danced increasingly closely with Dada: Abstract painting had become evermore intimate with its nemesis, the found object; and as such, color in abstract painting laid bare the commercial underpinnings of abstraction itself. Though abstraction was meant to be autonomous (non-representational), with color as a found object abstraction pointed to exterior mechanisms of commodity exchange from which it was supposed to remain immune. The painter was a consumer, in debt to the manufacturer of pigments.150 Decorator paints thus openly proclaimed color’s commodity status, denuding the artist’s palette of its mystique.151 Building off the painter and writer David Batchelor’s notion of “chromophobia,” Mangold’s paintings could be said to demonstrate a radical chromophilia. Batchelor posits color as the id of Western visual culture—an irruptive force whose systemic repression predicates any number of cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic regimes. By marginalizing it either as other (“the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile,

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the vulgar, the queer or the pathological”) or artifice (“the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic”), Western culture, he argues, has banished color from propriety: Color is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. . . . Either way, color is routinely excluded from the higher concerns of the Mind. It is other to the higher values of Western culture. Or perhaps culture is other to the higher values of color. Or color is the corruption of culture.152 Though Batchelor does not specifically mention Mangold, his analysis of sixties art is particularly poignant vis-à-vis the Walls and Areas’ use of decorator paints, as these works revealed the distinction between fine art and commercial colors to be specious— the sanctity of the former being contingent on the subjugation of the latter. In the era of mass consumerism, which flooded the American marketplace with a new world of industrially made color, the privileged status of artist colors rang especially false. Per Batchelor: Perhaps artists’ colors and materials were art’s guarantee, a kind of certainty, art’s pedigree in a universe of aliens, impostors and mongrels; its received pronunciation in a world of strange and irregular voices. Perhaps this was the attraction of commercial paints: they seemed to contain the possibility for both the continuation and the cancellation of painting.153 Mangold’s chromatic promiscuity thus carried the transgressive psychological force of the return of the repressed. To viewers inculcated with the traditions of fifties-era painting, this shift in attitude towards color sparked profound anxieties, as seen in Danna Knego’s glib letter to the editor in response to Bannard’s article: “Darby Bannard is just the man I’ve been looking for. Can I arrange to hire him to paint my bathroom?”154

Lippard’s Impossible Synthesis While Lippard and her fellow critics might not have pinpointed the Walls and Areas industrial antecedents with perfect accuracy, they nonetheless registered their threat to established cultural hierarchies in telling fashion. The challenge for Lippard—who attempted the most sustained theorization of Mangold’s work in the sixties—was how to reconcile this aspect of Mangold’s work with her otherwise modernist understanding of abstract painting. In the two essays penned after Walls and Areas, Lippard demonstrated the significance of Greenberg’s criticism for her thinking, situating Mangold in a formalist paradigm that was inherently antithetical to his work’s mass cultural references. The introduction to “The Implications of Monochrome” patently reflects the senior critic’s theoretical framework: Robert Mangold’s near-monochrome Areas are in themselves a comment on abstract painting’s current dilemma. We have reached the point where only the symmetrical (square), imageless, textureless, patternless, even colorless canvas can be considered radically advanced. Composition, drawing, even inflection are

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gradually being ruled out by the proponents of an outwardly simple, essentially complex, self-critical art.155 It is not difficult to imagine the identity of Lippard’s nameless “proponents,” as her use of the term “self-critical art” would have readily connoted Greenberg’s criticism to an informed reader. Yet the prior passage signals her ambivalence towards the senior critic. Her description of the qualities of a “radically advanced” painting reads like a near parody of his notion of “post-painterly abstraction.” One senses her resentment towards the forces that have hemmed painting into its present “dilemma.” And yet her essay supports Mangold as an artist who willingly occupies this challenging terrain, creating paintings that conform to the modernist precepts she enumerates. Greenberg was not the only party Lippard charged with culpability for painting’s current predicament. Equally complicit was the public’s voracity for modern art. Like other critics at mid-decade, Lippard had witnessed with dismay the rapid domestication of succeeding waves of the avant-garde, from Abstract Expressionism, to Pop, Neo-Dada, Op, and so on.156 In ever-quicker succession, the shock of the new faded into easy familiarity in consumerist-driven cycles of obsolescence. For Lippard, this institutionalized cooptation of modern art increased the burden on truly advanced artists, whose purpose was to “[add] another dimension to the way the public sees”: Artists with integrity in all fields have been forced into a rarified and increasingly intellectual atmosphere by the over-acceptance of a too eager audience which still does not comprehend. The primary painting or structure demands more from its audience and in so demanding, heightens perception.157 Though again not cited outright, Lippard’s analysis tacitly references Greenberg. Beaten back by an easily jaded public, contemporary painters attempted increasingly esoteric feats of self-criticality, resulting in ever more nuanced perceptual effects. The asymptotic limit to this hastened retreat was, of course, the blank canvas—an endgame scenario with which Lippard, like Wollheim and Greenberg before her, was forced to contend: The ultimate in a no-color, no-nothing work that is still a painting might be a sprayed white canvas—not white formica or any other absolutely smooth material, for if a surface is not painted it becomes “sculptural,” no matter how the edges are treated. Would this be an “empty” canvas? Probably not, if it were done right, for as the reduction becomes more extreme, every mark, every absence of mark, takes on added significance.158 She directly follows this passage by quoting Greenberg’s comments on this subject from “After Abstract Expressionism,” in which he asserts: “a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one.”159 Lippard cites this text as evidence for her argument, yet the two critics read the blank canvas in decidedly different ways that speak to their divergent interests. For Greenberg, the blank canvas remained pictorial—the flat, planar telos of modernist painting. For Lippard, it was the gateway to sculpture, an interpretation that reflects her familiarity with Judd’s renegade rerouting of modernist dogma and her literalist sympathies more broadly. In her analysis, the application of paint on a two-dimensional

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surface—however uninflected and bereft of incident—was the essence of painting. Absent this, one was left with the literal object. Her description of “white formica” or other “smooth material” could easily be imagined as a hypothetical Minimalist relief. Ironically, Greenberg would also come to see Minimalism (“the primary painting or structure” in Lippard’s essay) as the product of a pressured avant-garde. Yet where Lippard saw an art genuinely committed to challenging the public, Greenberg saw ersatz avant-gardism, or “Novelty art”—this latter term denoting a fashionable, easily consumed product, furnished with the trappings of high culture but possessing none of its substance.160 For Greenberg, the challenge to taste posed by Minimalism was entirely spurious. “The retreat to the easy from the difficult,” he wrote in 1969, “is to be more knowingly, aggressively, extravagantly masked by the guises of the difficult.”161 Minimalism, in this view, readily catered to the public’s insatiable appetite for the latest trend: The Minimalists appeared to have realized, finally, that the far-out in itself has to be the far-out as an end in itself, and that this means the furthest-out and nothing short of that. They appear also to have realized that the most original and furthest-out art of the last hundred years always arrived looking at first as though it had parted company with everything previously known as art. In other words, the furthest-out usually lay out on the borderline between art and non-art.162 Regarding Minimalism, Lippard and Greenberg formulated diametrically opposed responses to the same cultural conditions. Faced with the demands of an insatiable public, the former saw an art of resistance, the latter capitulation. Ironically, these divergent interpretations converged at “the borderline between art and non-art”— i.e., the readymade—via modernist reflexivity (Lippard), and the cynical search for the “far-out” (Greenberg). Here, too, the authors’ opposed understandings of the blank canvas was decisive. Because it remained pictorial for Greenberg, “the initial look of non-art was no longer available to painting,”163 thereby insulating the medium from Dada. Lippard, on the other hand, also distanced painting from Dada, but by proposing a radically permissive materialism, in which a surface as vacant as the blank canvas presented its own aesthetic merits, albeit as sculpture. Lippard’s essays on Mangold provide yet another illustration of Minimalism’s discourses’ myriad engagements with Greenberg’s criticism.164 Her argument repurposed his theoretical framework to support an art he personally could not endorse. Yet in key respects, she remained quite true to the spirit of his critical project. The theory of medium specificity as formulated in his earliest essays was, after all, designed to safeguard modern art from the clutches of mass culture.165 So it is in her essay, in which aesthetic reflexivity staves off the encroaching public. The fact that Greenberg would come to dismiss much of the art that best exemplified this doctrine as “Novelty art” again demonstrates the dissonance that emerged between theory and individual taste in his writings of the sixties. Of course the other operative force in Lippard’s criticism was literalism. While she drew heavily on Greenberg’s notion of aesthetic reflexivity, she by no means proselytized for pure opticality. Judd’s influence drove a wedge into her reading of Greenberg, splintering off a heretical critical model that could bridge the modernist and literalist divide. Her internalization of Judd’s writings was made explicit early on, as in the

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Walls and Areas exhibition announcement, which characterized Mangold’s art as a “specific object” due to the use of conspicuous shape to “[dispel] banal pictorial associations.”166 However, she would come to mollify this interpretation as she lent greater weight to the Areas’ optical engagements. These works, we later learn, represented the artist’s “move towards the less specific.”167 In “The Implications of Monochrome” and “The Silent Art,” Lippard advanced an interpretation of Mangold’s art that most closely grasped its dialectical formalism. She writes of an “art of equilibrium and paradox”168 based on the “dangerous notion of ‘cropped atmosphere’” that “[succeeds] visually by dint of sheer conviction and physical presence, where [it is] questionable theoretically.”169 These lines speak to her understanding of Mangold’s desired “chancy experience-position” and of the precarious terrain his art sought to occupy. She recognized how the Areas tempered their emphasis on material surface with dematerializing atmospherics, suspending antithetical tendencies within a unified aesthetic whole. Lippard comprehended the formal mechanics and discursive parameters of Mangold’s art better than any other critic weighing in on his early work. Yet as mentioned previously, her criticism methodologically precluded a meaningful reckoning with his art’s mass cultural references. This was made especially evident by his inclusion in her 1967 exhibition “Focus on Light” at the New Jersey State Museum, co-curated by Richard Bellamy. The curators situated Mangold, as well as other contemporary abstract painters such as Ralph Humphrey, Larry Poons, and Morris Louis, in a continuous tradition of “total light” painting that originated in the mid-19th century. As described by Lippard in the catalogue essay, the emphasis on light was synonymous with abstraction itself: “A single transcendent light is a vehicle of totality, and ultimately of abstraction.”170 The exhibition put a new twist on a familiar tale—i.e., the obliteration of representation from Turner and the Impressionists through postwar modernist abstraction. In Lippard’s telling, the march to flatness progressed in lockstep with ever greater optical rarefaction: The spectator’s perceptual faculties evolved apace. As palettes became lighter and lighter, the public, unused to seeing paintings without the “old master finish,” was appalled.  .  . . While the eye of the audience inevitably lags behind that of the painter, it gradually became accustomed to a natural rather than an artificial or studio light, as painters began to work “sur le motif,” or “on the spot,” in the landscape. . . Yet a Constable seems dark when compared to a Turner, and a Turner, when compared to a nearly invisible, grey Mangold of 1966 seems relatively descriptive. The development since the nineteenth century of a small but devoted audience sensitive to extreme visual subtleties is a factor in the success of today’s so-called “minimal art.”171 This passage historicizes her previously discussed argument about the avant-garde and its public. The viewers’ evolving sensitivities spurred a withdrawal from the “descriptive” towards an increasingly evanescent painting of light. The atomized gradations of color in the Areas make Mangold an obvious reference point for such a narrative. Yet Lippard does not mention the fact that this art, with its industrial sourcing, was, in a manner of speaking, “descriptive.” The insipid hue of a painting like Manila Area of 1966, for example, plainly points to the world of office supplies. Yet by characterizing the work as an areferential “total light,” she foreclosed on such associations.

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Indeed, while she spoke of decorator colors and prefabrication, Lippard ultimately viewed Mangold as residing firmly in the preserve of the highbrow. In “The Silent Art,” she characterized his art as a salvific oasis in the desert of mass culture. The work presented the public with a salubrious challenge at a time when “easy culture, instant culture, has become so accessible.”172 In this essay, she described the type of spectatorship occasioned by an art of such perceptual nuance: The experience of looking at and perceiving an “empty” or “colorless” surface usually progresses through boredom. The spectator may find the work dull, then impossibly dull; then, surprisingly, he breaks out on the other side of boredom into an area that can be called contemplation or simply esthetic enjoyment, and the work becomes increasingly interesting.173 For Lippard, Mangold’s art functioned something like a Zen koan—an object of prolonged meditation that elicits epiphanic awareness. In this view, the paintings’ industrial elements served as a smokescreen, which, once pierced by the sustained attention of a properly attuned viewer, divulged their revelatory content. This formulation places us on familiar ground. Her description of a sudden breakthrough from prosaic reality into an elevated realm of contemplation resonates with other modernist models of spectatorship. In 1959, Greenberg wrote of the “at-onceness” that occurs before an abstract painting: “You become all attention, which means you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention.”174 Months after Lippard published “The Silent Art,” Michael Fried famously posited “presentness” as the essence of the modernist aesthetic encounter.175 While she did not uphold these critics’ ideal of a purely optical, disembodied mode of perception, she shared with them more than she likely would have cared to admit. All three described the act of viewing as what Rosalind Krauss has described as “an experience which is allegorized as one of pure cognition.”176 For these critics, abstract painting lifted the viewer out of the slipstream of mass culture and into a hermetic realm of contemplation ontologically resistant to the corrosive effects of kitsch.

Mangold’s Sublation Clearly a dialectically motivated practice such as Mangold’s requires a more thoroughly dialectical model of modernism to accommodate it. An art that draws on both Rothko and the lumberyard, Newman and found color, can only frustrate the hard-and-fast Greenbergian distinction between art and kitsch. This interdependence of high and low instead conforms to a pattern of sublation that Thomas Crow has argued is constitutive of modernism itself: [M]odernist negation—which is modernism in its most powerful moments— proceeds from a productive confusion within the normal hierarchy of cultural prestige. Advanced artists repeatedly make unsettling equations between high and low which dislocate the apparently fixed terms of that hierarchy into new and persuasive configurations, thus calling it into question from within.177 As the Walls and Areas make plain, this troubling of high/low binaries manifests itself not solely in the work of art’s content but also its form, resulting in “a new rigor of

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formal organization, an articulate consistency of attention within the material fact of the picture surface.”178 While Crow wrote of this heightened formal rigor in relation to the Parisian avant-garde from Impressionism to Cubism, one could argue that his words resonate just as forcefully with the obdurate surfaces of early Mangold. Such an account does justice to the risky spirit of the painter’s early work and reflects his ambition to extend the legacy of Newman and Rothko by sullying it with industrial color, anti-compositional strategies, and depersonalized facture. By mediating antithetical tendencies within a single aesthetic entity, Mangold destabilized the forces of exclusion that predicated such cultural polarities. David Batchelor has argued that this type of dialectical understanding of modernism, in which art renews itself by turning outside its established purview, has been the mechanism for painting’s continued reinvention in the face of the many calls for its demise: [P]ainting has been continued by constantly being tested against that which stands outside painting-as-art: the photograph, the written word, decoration, literalness or objecthood. In other words, painting has been continued by being continuously corrupted: by being made impure rather than pure; by being made ambiguous, uncertain and unstable; and by not limiting itself to its own competences. Painting has been kept going by embracing rather than resisting that which might extinguish it, and this has included embracing the possibility of painting becoming all but indistinguishable from a paint-job.179 A “paint-job”—it is difficult to think of a body of work that illustrates this term better than the rolled and sprayed surfaces of the Walls and Areas. Batchelor’s account of painting’s ongoing renewal can be a tonic to the study of Minimalism, with its overheated polemics and medium-related anxieties. While much attention has been paid to the “death of painting” dramas this period set in motion, writers like Batchelor and Crow prompt us to consider how these forces of adversity might have reinvigorated the medium. Rather than a final gasp in painting’s expiring teleology, Mangold’s work embodied strategies for adaptation and survival. Though his practice is often relegated to the periphery of a primarily sculptural field, Mangold’s art took root at the heart of the period’s critiques of painting, which is to say at the heart of Minimalism itself.

Notes 1. Robert Mangold, “Statement for a Panel on Abstract Art, ‘The Geometric Tradition in American Art 1930–1990,’ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1993,” in Robert Mangold (London: Phaidon, 2000), 163. For the sculptors’ views on the term “Minimalism,” see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 3–5. 2. Lynne Cooke, “Robert Mangold: Frames of Reference,” in Robert Mangold: Attic Series I–VI, exh. cat. (London: Lisson Gallery, 1990), 8. 3. Cooke has also commented on this quality of Mangold’s work, writing, “This undecidability between competing conceptual and perceptual claims is at once part of the artwork as a ‘specific object,’ a singular entity.” Ibid., 13. 4. Robert Storr, “Betwixt and Between,” in Robert Mangold (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 91–2 and Nancy Princenthal, “A Survey of the Paintings,” in Robert Mangold, 207–8. 5. The following account of Mangold’s early years relies primarily on Nancy Princenthal’s thorough telling in Princenthal, 170–3. 6. Robert Mangold, “Robert Mangold and Urs Raussmüller: A Talk on December 5, 1992,” in Robert Mangold, exh. cat. (Schaffhausen: Hallen für neue Kunst; Paris: RENN Espace d’Art Contemporain, 1993), 61.

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7. Robert Storr offers a similar formulation of the relationship between Mangold’s hardedged abstraction and the gestural energies of Abstract Expressionism. Robert Storr, “Mangold’s Fresh Start,” in Robert Mangold: Early Works 1963–66, exh. cat. (New York: Peter Freeman Gallery, 2004), 8–9. 8. Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 7, no. 3 (April 25, 1964): 58. 9. Jane Harrison, “In the Galleries: Robert Mangold,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 6 (March 1964): 67. 10. Lucy R. Lippard, “New York: Robert Mangold, Thibaut Gallery,” Artforum 11, no. 9 (March 1964): 19. 11. Robert Mangold, “Interview with Sylvia Plimack Mangold,” in Robert Mangold, 60. 12. Mangold, “Robert Mangold and Urs Raussmüller,” 59. 13. Robert Storr has also commented on Mangold’s dialectical mediation of the literal and optical, writing: “Material objectivity and optical ambiguity are the poles between which Mangold’s painting of this formative period oscillated.” Robert Storr, “Mangold’s Fresh Start,” 8. 14. Robert Storr, “Interview with Robert Storr on October 1, 1986,” in Abstrakte Malerei aus Amerika und Europa/Abstract Painting of America and Europe (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1988), 185. 15. Mangold, “Interview with Sylvia Plimack Mangold,” 60–2. 16. Irving Sandler and Barbara Rose, eds., “Sensibility of the Sixties,” Art in America 55, no. 1 (January–February 1967): 54. 17. David Carrier, “Robert Mangold’s ‘Gray Window Wall,’” The Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1125 (December 1996): 828. 18. Interview with Robert Mangold, conducted by Claire Dienes and Lillian Tone, 2000. Museum of Modern Art Archives, 40. 19. Ibid., 41. 20. Robert Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White, View 1, no. 7 (December 1978): 20. 21. Carrier, 828. 22. Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, “Robert Mangold and the Implications of Monochrome,” Art and Literature 9 (Summer 1966): 116–17. 23. Storr, “Betwixt and Between,” 81. 24. Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White: 5. 25. Ibid., 3. 26. Both Storr and Cooke have applied Judd’s formulation of the specific object to Mangold’s early work. Storr, “Betwixt and Between,” 80. Cooke, “Robert Mangold,” 8–9. 27. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 181. 28. Mangold uses this term to describe painting in a relief mode in Mangold, “Interview with William Weiss,” June 3, 1994. Archives of American Art Oral History Program, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, unpaginated. 29. Both Judd and Morris had their first one-person exhibitions at the Green Gallery in 1963. 30. Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White: 3. 31. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 183. Jensen’s importance for Judd is discussed in the following chapter. Although somewhat of a forgotten figure today (a circumstance partially redressed by a 2012 exhibition at Algus Greenspon Gallery, New York), George Ortman was a prominent presence in the New York art world in the late fifties and sixties, regularly exhibiting at the Stable and Howard Wise galleries. His Surrealist reliefs, which resembled cryptic, symbolically laden board games, were widely admired and earned him a place in the 1963 Jewish Museum exhibition, “Toward a Newer Abstraction.” In 1970, Ortman took a teaching a position at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and stopped exhibiting in New York. For more on his art of this period, see George Ortman: Constructions/ Paintings/Drawings, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1965). 32. Judd himself never viewed “Specific Objects” as a manifesto. As he later told Lippard, “Despite what people thought . . . [it was not supposed to be] a doctrinaire, or dogmatic, or definitive, or anything article.” Quoted in Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 134.

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33. Maurice Poirier, et al., “The 60s in Abstract: 13 Statements and an Essay,” Art in America 71, no. 9 (October 1983): 132. Insley’s paintings of the sixties derived from an interest in modular architectural structures. These early works by Insley would become the foundation for his ONECITY, a utopian project of visionary architecture to which he would devote the rest of his career. 34. Mangold has discussed Barnett Newman as being particularly important to his interest in architectural scale: “In Newman I saw a sense of architecture in terms of the work, and a sense of the viewer’s relation to the work—the viewer standing in front of the work and his particular size and position in relation to the work. That’s what I’ve thought about ever since in terms of my own work.” Judith Richards, ed., “Robert Mangold,” in Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York (New York: Independent Curators International, 2004), 251. For a discussion of this orientation to the wall demonstrated by Mangold and his peers, see Christianna Bonin, “Between Wall & Paper: Rethinking LeWitt’s Wall Drawings,” in Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen, exh. cat. (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 2012), 27–43. 35. Poirier, 130. 36. Carrier, 826. 37. Ibid. 38. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 189–90, note 10. Quoted in Ian Balfour, “The Whole Is the Untrue,” The Fragment: An Incomplete History, ed. William Tronzo (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009), 86. Balfour’s commentary on this passage further elucidates the critique of aesthetic autonomy that a work like Brown Corner enacts: “In Adorno’s hands, the fragment mimes, in however negative a fashion, the fragmented world out of which it partly sprang to which it partly returns. Yet, also in Adorno’s hands, the fragment does this not without having done some positive damage in the meantime, at least temporarily upsetting the regime of the whole.” Ibid., 88. 39. Certain paintings in Mangold’s Thibaut Gallery show also featured metal moldings or aluminum supports, though the Walls literally foregrounded these elements more, as they were now a primary element of aesthetic consideration rather than an aspect of a painterly ground. 40. Interview with Robert Mangold, conducted by Claire Dienes and Lillian Tone, 2000, 46. 41. Responding to this quality of the Walls, Robert Storr wrote that they represented “a new kind of constructivism—or what, by virtue of its basic carpentry, might better be called constructionism.” Storr, “Mangold’s Fresh Start,” 8. 42. Carrier, 827. 43. The Wall that came to reside in Hesse’s kitchen recalls a later exchange between her and Sol LeWitt. In 1967, these two artists made one another coffee tables, which, like Mangold’s Wall, hybridized the aesthetic and the utilitarian, originating out of a studio practice but ultimately functioning as domestic furniture. These exchanges point to the existence of a possibly larger downtown creative economy that blurred the boundaries separating the objects of art from those of everyday life. For an account of LeWitt and Hesse’s coffee tables, see Kirsten Swenson, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 1–2. The relationship between Mangold’s early works and the exigencies of downtown loft living will be discussed in great depth later in this chapter. 44. Poirier, 130. 45. Lynne Cooke has similarly described the “dialectical tension” in Mangold’s early work. Cooke, “Robert Mangold,” 11. 46. Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White: 17–18. 47. Ibid., 6. 48. Ibid., 12. 49. Numerous writers on Mangold’s work have discussed the relationship between his seams and Newman’s Zips. For recent examples, see Storr, “Betwixt and Between,” 88 and Princenthal, 182–23.

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50. Clement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” revised and reprinted in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 298. 51. Alloway, “Systemic Painting,” 25. 52. Carrier, 827. 53. Robert Mangold, “A Collage of Notes for Lectures,” in Robert Mangold, exh. cat. (Xunta de Galciia: Centro de Arte Contemporánea, 1999), 114. 54. Ibid. 55. Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White: 4–5. 56. Mangold, “Robert Mangold and Urs Raussmüller,” 83. 57. Mangold, “Interview with William Weiss.” 58. Carrier, 826–7. 59. James Meyer does discuss Grosvenor’s inclusion in “Primary Structures,” and he was included in the LACMA’s A Minimal Future?. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 18–20. Ann Goldstein, “Robert Grosvenor,” in A Minimal Future?, 204–9. 60. Mangold, “Robert Mangold and Urs Raussmüller,” 83. 61. The Areas’ derivation of abstract compositions from observed negative spaces had a precedent in the art of Ellsworth Kelly, who similarly bridged abstraction and reference. While Mangold certainly would have been familiar with Kelly’s work due to his 1965 show at Sidney Janis Gallery and his inclusion in numerous prominent group exhibitions, including Primary Structures and Systemic Painting, he would not have entirely grasped their use of anti-compositional strategies, which would not be fully illuminated until Yve-Alain Bois’s essay “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-Composition in Its Many Guises,” in Bois, Jack Cowart, and Alfred Pacquement, Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France 1948–1954, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 9–36. For additional discussion of the relationship between Mangold and Kelly, see Storr, “Betwixt and Between,” 86–7. 62. Robert Mangold, Interview with Lucy Lippard, audio recording, December 1965. Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 63. There is some discrepancy in Mangold’s accounts of this element of his practice. In discussing the Areas with Lucy Lippard in 1965, he said, “I’ve never drawn them from particular . . . I don’t go up and draw them from specific things.” Mangold, Interview with Lucy Lippard. In 1978, he told Robin White, “[T]he first ones that I did that way were literal translations almost of building gaps.” Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White: 17. 64. Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White: 16–17. 65. Clement Greenberg, “Introduction to an Exhibition of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 149–53; Michael Fried, “New York Letter: Olitski, Jenkins, Thiebaud, Twombly,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 316–22. 66. Jules Olitski, “How My Arts Gets Made,” Partisan Review 68, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 617. 67. Mangold, Interview with Lucy R. Lippard. Greenberg’s influence at Bennington was so pronounced that art world insiders referred to the school as “Clemsville.” Whiteley, 168. 68. Similarly, Robert Storr writes of the Areas, “[T]he flatness of the picture plane . . . began to show liminal spatial fluctuations, intimations of radiant depth that in the young artist’s work were ever so gently contradicted by the uninflected smoothness of rolled-on or sprayed-on pigments adhering to opaque, palpably uniform masonite boards.” Storr, “Mangold’s Fresh Start,” 8. 69. Richard Shiff, “Autonomy, Actuality, Mangold,” in Robert Mangold (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 287, note 161. 70. Ibid, note 168. 71. Shiff, “Autonomy, Actuality, Mangold,” 38–40 and Princenthal, 179–80. 72. Robert Mangold, “Flat Art, 1967,” in Robert Mangold (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 162. 73. This passage originally appears in Philip Pavia, “Polemic on One-Eye Formats,” ARTnews 65, no. 8 (December 1966): 30. 74. Pavia, 63. 75. Quoted in Mangold, “Flat Art, 1967,” 162.

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76. Kubler was particularly important to Morris for his master’s thesis on Constantin Brancusi. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 154–5. For a discussion of Kubler and Smithson, see Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 218–56. 77. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 14–15. 78. Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 117. 79. Mangold, Interview with Lucy R. Lippard. 80. Mangold, “Interview with Robert Mangold,” conducted by Robin White: 11. 81. Describing their friendship at this time, Mangold wrote, “In the early years, when our studios were in the same neighborhood, we saw each other’s work frequently. I don’t recall long and heated discussions about art issues, but they may have happened. Yet I think through our friendship we developed a supportive admiration and interest in what each of us was doing, and there was some shared ideas [sic.] in our work.” Susan Cross and Denise Markonish, Sol LeWitt: 100 Views (North Adams: MASS MoCA; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 77. 82. Swenson notes that the upward projecting planes in LeWitt’s objects evoke painting’s vertical orientation, while the industrial lacquer suggested “ambivalence” towards the medium. Swenson, 84. 83. Swenson describes the exhibition as “engag[ing] the gallery as a site by activating its negative space.” Ibid., 85. 84. Swenson writes, “The Daniels installation represented an eschewal of psychology and hierarchy that would come to characterize LeWitt’s work: the shift of focus from the object to the viewer’s subjective perceptual, intellectual, and physical engagement, and from the object to the spatial conditions of its display.” Ibid., 85–6. 85. Mangold, “Flat Art, 1967,” 162. 86. Commenting on the Curved Areas’ mediation of nature and geometry, Richard Shiff writes, “Mangold was using the geometry of his ‘compass curve’ to defuse a reference to organic nature, even as he was attending to nature to defuse what might have become an intellectualized geometric abstraction—art too pure, too refined. He eliminated ‘references’ from both directions, settling into a kind of ‘middle,’ an independent fragment of an implied whole.” Shiff, “Autonomy, Actuality, Mangold,” 29. 87. Quoted in Shiff, “Autonomy, Actuality, Mangold,” 43. 88. James R. Mellow, “New York Letter,” Art International 12, no. 1 (January 1968): 62. 89. Mangold, “Flat Art, 1967,” 162. 90. Emily Wasserman, “New York,” Artforum 7, no. 9 (May 1969): 67. 91. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” reprinted in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 12. 92. Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October 6 (Autumn 1978): 46–60. 93. Cross and Markonish, 77. 94. LeWitt owned 12-by-18-inch versions of the two X Series Central Diagonal paintings. Robert Mangold, Robert Mangold: Schilderijen/Paintings 1964–1982, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1982), np. 95. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 200. 96. Meyer identifies certain LeWitt structures as the “missing links” that provide some semblance of continuity between the Daniels and Dwan exhibitions, but none of the works he mentions evince the serial strategies found in Mangold’s Curved Area works. Ibid. 97. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 13. 98. Mangold created several additional series of what could be classified as “conceptual painting” in the late sixties. For an account of this work, see Princenthal, 191–6. 99. Mangold, “Interview with Sylvia Plimack Mangold,” 63–5. 100. Laura Cottingham’s otherwise thorough account of Lippard’s critical corpus gives her writings about Minimalism short shrift, beginning its analysis in earnest with her first writings on Conceptual art. Laura Cottingham, “Shifting Ground: On the Critical Practice of Lucy R. Lippard,” in Seeing Through the Seventies; Essays on Feminism and Art (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000), 1–46.

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101. Lucy Lippard, interviewed by Sharon Zane, December 21, 1999, The Museum of Modern Art Oral History Project, 45. www.moma.org/docs/learn/archives/transcript_lippard.pdf. No less an independent voice than Robert Rosenblum later recalled, “It’d be hard for anyone to imagine the papal authority Greenberg had . . . he really was the looming power that dominated our way of thinking about art.” Quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–74 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 163. 102. Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 4 (January 1965): 26–32. As James Meyer has noted, while the “topos of the ‘minimal’” predated Wollheim’s essay, it was the first to explicitly label a “Minimal Art,” albeit not in reference to the artists now associated with canonical Minimalism. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 142. 103. John Canaday, “Art: Starting from the Top, Sidney Goodman’s Show,” New York Times, October 16, 1965. 104. Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Mangold: Walls and Areas, exh. broch. (New York: Fischbach Gallery, 1965), unpaginated. 105. “[Reinhardt’s] logical application of this premise (apparently, that by infinitely painstaking selection and discarding an artist may extract an irreducible essence from color and geometry, the bases of painting) has led him . . . close to the discovery that not an essence but a void may lie at the end of his search.” John Canaday, “Art: Running the Gambit,” New York Times, October 21, 1960. 106. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 81. 107. Ibid. 108. Lucy Lippard has recalled that Canaday was particularly wary of artists fraternizing with critics, believing that it threatened criticism’s objectivity. This review suggests he viewed the converse—that an awareness of criticism compromised art’s authenticity—also to be true. Lucy Lippard, interviewed by Sharon Zane, 48. 109. David Bourdon, “Art: Cool, Obdurate,” Village Voice, October 21, 1965, 11. 110. Ibid. 111. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 142. 112. Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 398. 113. Ibid., 399. 114. Ibid. 115. Swenson has recently discussed this article in relation to the early work of LeWitt and Eva Hesse. Swenson, 61–3. 116. Lucy R. Lippard, “The Third Stream: Painted Sculpture and Painted Structures,” Art Voices 4, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 45. 117. “However, in New York, certainly the strongest direct influence or source of the new work is 28-year-old Frank Stella.” Ibid., 46. 118. Ibid., 45. 119. She acknowledges, for example, that “even when the formal framework of one artist’s structures closely resembles another’s, as with Morris and de Maria, the conceptual differences set the final products a great distance apart.” Ibid., 149. 120. Ibid. 121. Lippard writes of how Mangold was “beginning to take his works further and further away from the wall . . . gradually approaching a free-standing concept,” suggesting he had not yet reached the turning point in his practice embodied by the tension between Grey window wall and Red Wall. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. In his history of SoHo loft living, Aaron Shkuda quotes loft resident Naomi Antonakos on the frequency with which she and her neighbors would erect and relocate walls: “We could put up walls and take them down, it was so completely flexible.” Another resident, Yuki Ohta, who was raised in a downtown loft from a young age, recalled that when a Japanese woman came to live with her family to provide childcare, her father simply said, “Oh, another person! Let’s build a couple of walls!” Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 63.

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124. Lippard, Robert Mangold, exh. broch. 125. Lippard, “Robert Mangold and the Implications of Monochrome,” 126. 126. In a 1962 New York Times article, architect George D. Brown of Brown & Guenther lamented that prefabrication’s use in the single-family home industry far outpaced that in apartment building construction. George D. Brown, “Prefabs Urged for Apartments,” New York Times, August 26, 1962. Two years later, architectural historian G.E. Kidder Smith wrote in a letter to the editor that Americans were far behind “even eastern Europe (including the Soviets) in their use of prefabricated concrete panel construction, a technique that was “without question the key to much economic housing.” G.E. Kidder Smith, “Low Cost Housing Design,” New York Times, August 14, 1964. It would not be until 1967 that an apartment complex in Michigan City, Indiana would be lauded for its innovative use of “[p]refabricated, steel-walled building blocks, each containing a unit of dwelling space,” as a means for providing affordable housing. “Apartments Will Be Built With Room-Sized Blocks,” New York Times, September 24, 1967. 127. This historical sketch of postwar prefabrication draws primarily from Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 231–41. 128. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 195. 129. Peter Blake, “The Suburbs are a Mess,” Saturday Evening Post 236, no. 34 (October 5, 1963): 14. 130. Ada Louise Huxtable, “‘Clusters’ Instead of ‘Slurbs,’” New York Times, February 9, 1964. 131. Ibid. 132. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 365. 133. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 486. Also quoted in Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 123, note 63. For more on Whyte’s and Mumford’s critiques of the suburbs, see Becky Nicolaides, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs: Urban Scholars and Changing Perceptions of Authentic Community,” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 80–98. 134. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 7–9. 135. Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” revised and reprinted in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 14–23. 136. For more on Judd’s interest in crystallography as it pertained to “The Crystal Land,” see Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 79–83. 137. For more on this subject, see Meyer, Minimalism, 184–7. 138. Lippard, Robert Mangold, exh. broch. 139. Bourdon, “Art: Cool, Obdurate,” 11. 140. Michael Benedikt, “New York Letter,” Art International 9, no. 9–10 (December 20, 1965): 41. 141. William Berkson, “In the Galleries: Robert Mangold,” Arts Magazine 40, no. 2 (December 1965): 66. 142. Harry Henderson, “The Mass-Produced Suburbs: I. How People Live in America’s Newest Towns,” Harper’s 208, no. 1242 (November 1953): 26. 143. Russell Lynes, The Taste-Makers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 336–7. 144. Quoted in Princenthal, 179. 145. Walter Darby Bannard, “Color, Paint, and Present-Day Painting,” Artforum 4, no. 8 (April 1966): 35. My discussion of this article and the issue of color and the readymade is indebted to Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 357–60. 146. Bannard, 35. 147. Ibid., 36. 148. Ibid. Mangold maintains that he still mixed his own colors in the sixties. Nonetheless, by working with commercial colors, he benefited from the expanded chromatic field that Bannard describes. Furthermore, by drawing his colors from banal consumer goods, he

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150.

151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

Robert Mangold adopted a Duchampian approach to his palette not unrelated to Bannard’s. Robert Mangold, in discussion with the author, April 19, 2012. As Thierry de Duve has observed, Marcel Duchamp made a similar point, when he said, “Let’s say you use a tube of paint; you didn’t make it. You bought it and used it as a readymade. Even if you mix two vermilions together, it’s still a mixing of two readymades. So man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from readymade things like even his own mother and father.” Quoted in Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998), 162. Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 360. See also de Duve, 147–96. The contemporary painter Amy Sillman recently voiced this realization in relation to her own practice: “I realized recently that I am somewhat doomed to the palette provided to me by the manufacturers of oil colors. My base materials are paints chosen in part by the tastes of the people who run the R&F pigment factory in Kingston, New York, where I buy many of my paint supplies.  .  . . [W]hat I think of as ‘my’ palette is in fact a readymade, informed by the manufacturing choices made by a paint company.” Amy Sillman, “On Color,” in Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, ed. Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 116. Related to this point, I disagree with Nancy Princenthal, who attributes critics’ references to Mangold’s decorative palette to their lack of visual acuity (Princenthal, 179). The frequency with which this theme arises gives it a poignancy that cannot be explained away as a misperception by the art press. Critics knew precisely of what they spoke when writing about Mangold’s decorator colors, as similarly unorthodox hues had been appearing in the work of several of New York’s most advanced painters. David Batchelor, Chromphobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 22–3. Ibid., 101–2. Danna Knego, “Letter,” Artforum 4, no. 10 (June 1966): 4. Lippard, “The Implications of Monochrome,” 116. For a related account of critics’ responses to this phenomenon, see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 215. Lippard, “The Implications of Monochrome,” 119. Ibid. Ibid. Originally published in Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 131–2. Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 254. For a more detailed discussion of Greenberg’s use of the term “Novelty Art,” see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 215. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 292. Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 252. Ibid. For more on the Minimalists indebtedness to Greenberg, see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 212 and Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36. See Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, 5–22 and Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 23–38. Lippard, Robert Mangold. Lippard, “The Implications of Monochrome,” 127. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 127. Lucy R. Lippard, “Notes on a Total Light,” in Focus on Light, ed. Richard Bellamy, et al., exh. cat. (Trenton: The New Jersey State Museum, 1967), unpaginated. Ibid. Lucy R. Lippard, “The Silent Art,” Art in America 55, no. 1 (January–February 1967): 63. Ibid. Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 81. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 168.

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176. Hal Foster, ed., “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, vol. 1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 75. 177. Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 33. 178. Ibid., 29. 179. Batchelor, 100–1.

© Jo Baer. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 1 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue, 1964–65, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, three panels, each panel 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). Philip Johnson Fund, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Plate 2 Robert Mangold, Untitled (Pale Red), 1973, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182. 9 cm). Gift of Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935. Yale University Art Gallery. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 3 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Red Wall, oil paint on fiberboard, 96.5 × 96.5 in. (245 × 245 cm). Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery. Tate, London. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: ©Tate, London, 2018.

Plate 4 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Yellow Wall (Section I + II), 1964, oil and acrylic on plywood and metal, two panels, overall size: 96 1/2 × 96 1/2 in. (244 × 244 cm). The Nancy Lee and Perry Bass Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2004.124.1. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 5 Robert Mangold (b. 1937), Manila-Neutral Area, 1965–67, oil on shaped composition board, two parts, 96 1/4 × 96 5/16 in. (244.5 × 244.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Philip Johnson 72.41a-b. © 2018 Robert Mangold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 6 David Novros, Untitled, 1970, fresco, 156 × 204 in. (396.2 × 518.2 cm), 101 Spring Street, New York. Courtesy of Judd Foundation Archives. © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 7 David Novros, 6:30, 1966–2006, acrylic on canvas on six wood panels, 72 × 103 in. (182.9 × 261.6 cm). The Menil Collection Houston, gift of the artist. © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

© 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo by Kevin Noble.

Plate 8 David Novros (b. 1941), Untitled, 1969, lacquer on fiberglass, six panels total, overall: 72 × 156 in. (182.9 × 296.2 cm).

Plate 9 Jo Baer (b. 1929), detail of Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue, 1964–65, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, three panels, each panel 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). Philip Johnson Fund, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Jo Baer. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 10 Ralph Humphrey (1932–1990), Wentworth, 1964, oil on canvas, 60 × 84 in. (152.4 × 213.4 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Ralph Humphrey and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Plate 11 Jules Olitski (1922–2007), Patutsky in Paradise, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 144 15/16 × 161 in. (292 × 409 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Purchase 1982, 82/169. © 2018 Estate of Jules Olitski/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

3

David Novros Painting in the House of Literalism

Novros and Judd in Dialogue David Novros’s early encounters with Judd’s criticism are a staple of his autobiographical accounts. “I read Judd when I was young, and I was enormously impressed,” he recalled. “Compared to most other writing out there, it was so lucid, logical—it made so much sense to me.”1 Even though he had not yet seen Judd’s art (which, at the time of Novros’s matriculation at the University of Southern California, still consisted solely of painting), he describes seizing on the older artist’s monthly reviews as an indispensable source of information about art coming out of New York. For the young painter, isolated in what he considered to be a provincial institution, Judd’s criticism was a lifeline to the nation’s art capital, so much so that he claims to have read it at the exclusion of all other art writing.2 Judd’s prose was a “breath of fresh air compared to all the . . . terrible writing that was being done about art”;3 it “cut through all the bullshit, went right to the experience, it was profound.”4 Judd’s significance for him would only deepen when, after returning from a post-graduation European sojourn, Novros settled in New York and saw the older artist’s mature sculpture. Shortly thereafter, they forged a friendship and entered into an artistic dialogue that culminated with Judd’s commission of a fresco from Novros for his residence at 101 Spring Street (Plate 6). While Judd’s criticism was seminal to many artists, the thought of a painting practice emerging out of his writing might strike a contemporary reader as paradoxical.5 Judd, after all, has been canonized as the period’s preeminent “death of painting” theorist, notorious for his incendiary pronouncements about the medium’s declining fortunes. An illustration of how pervasive this understanding of Judd’s position has become can be found in James Meyer’s summation of Robert Ryman’s practice in his survey of Minimalism written for a general audience: “Exploring the monochrome’s considerable formal potential, Ryman forestalls indefinitely Judd’s conclusion that painting is no longer a viable medium.”6 In this statement and others peppered throughout his writing on Minimalism, Meyer leaves no room for ambivalence: Judd’s disdain for painting verges on dogmatism.7 Inextricably illusionistic, painting would always be found wanting in comparison to the specificity of three dimensions. However, the case of David Novros points to the possibility of a different Donald Judd: the Judd who perspicaciously collected abstract and representational paintings by the likes of Stella, Reinhardt, and John Wesley and displayed them in his meticulously curated residences; the Judd who wrote lengthy essays praising the achievements of Pollock, Newman, Albers, and Malevich; and the Judd who, in 1977, told

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Kasper König, “My thought comes from painting, even if I don’t paint.” In short, it would seem that Judd’s view of painting was more nuanced than recent art historical accounts would allow.9 While his more polemical statements lend themselves to the construction of historicist arguments about the development of Minimalism, or of modernism and postmodernism more broadly, Judd himself would have frowned upon this kind of instrumentalization of his thought.10 “Specific Objects” actually contains caveats early in the essay designed to safeguard against just such a misreading: The objections to painting and sculpture are going to sound more intolerant than they are. There are qualifications.  .  . . Obviously, three-dimensional work will not cleanly succeed painting and sculpture. It’s not like a movement; anyway, movements no longer work; also, linear history has unraveled somewhat.  .  . . [T]his work which is neither painting nor sculpture challenges both. It will have to be taken into account by new artists. It will probably change painting and sculpture.11 Judd explicitly cautions against a determinist interpretation of the specific object. Three-dimensional work does not render painting obsolete, as Meyer’s earlier comments about Ryman would suggest. Instead, Judd envisions a future for painting, albeit one that has absorbed the implications of recent literalist practice. What might such a future look like? The career of David Novros suggests one possible scenario. Thus before delving into Novros’s engagements with Judd’s art and criticism, it is necessary to articulate an alternative understanding of the latter’s view of painting. Judd’s collected writings offer ample fodder for such an endeavor. From 1959–65, he wrote about painting on a nearly monthly basis, and a close reading of these reviews allows one to trace the development of his thinking about the medium as he observed the decline of second-generation Abstract Expressionism and the emergence of Color Field, Hard Edge, Op, and other modes of abstraction. There is more to be gleaned from this corpus than the oft-quoted proscriptions and historical foreclosures. In his discussions of painting, there are moments of ambivalence, expectant curiosity, and unbridled enthusiasm. To recapture how these reviews were received by a reader like Novros, it is necessary to highlight these less appreciated passages in Judd’s writing. This effort to draw out Judd’s sympathies to painting is not intended to portray him as “academic” or as an artist who “remains a painter—totally involved with questions of illusionism,” as Rosalind Krauss has argued.12 I would suggest that there is a middle ground between Meyer and Krauss—that it is possible to respect the specific object’s challenge to painting (contra Krauss) without boxing the artist into a categorical position against the medium (contra Meyer). The career of David Novros thus warrants a reappraisal, not only for its considerable art historical merit, but also for its heuristic value in coaxing out a less familiar side to one of the period’s most dominant voices.13

Judd on Painting While Judd’s attitudes toward painting evolved over the course of his tenure as a critic, his criteria for evaluating art in general were remarkably well-formed from the outset. His idiosyncratic critical lexicon has been the subject of a substantial amount of art historical exegesis but is perhaps best summarized by Adrian Kohn: “The best art is the most ‘interesting,’ and the most interesting art tends to be that in which the

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form, color, surface, space, and other ‘aspects’ are ‘polarized’ and ‘specific’—that is, jarring with but not counteracting one another.”14 While this evaluative framework certainly lent itself to the support of the three-dimensional practices that Judd would come to advocate, it is important to remember that he first articulated it in response to painting. For example, in a digression on the work of Jackson Pollock in an early review of Helen Frankenthaler, he posits the closest thing one finds in his collected writings to a definition of “generality,” another key term in his lexicon: Pollock achieves generality by establishing an extreme polarity between the simple, immediate perception of paint and canvas, a reduction to unexpandable sensation, and the complexity and overtones of his imagery and articulated structure. Such diverse elements combined under tension produce a totality much greater and unlike any of the parts.15 Pollock’s productive tension between the sensate particularity of the individual drip and the macro-level superstructure made him an exemplar for Judd’s critical paradigm that Judd would return to repeatedly as his criticism evolved. Today, Judd’s criticism might be most closely associated with its lodestars—i.e., Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, etc.—as well as his own art, but it could be argued that it took its distinctive shape in response to the wealth of recent art that Judd disdained. With the periodic exception of an exhibition by a firstgeneration New York School lion, Judd’s monthly beat took him to galleries filled with the work of lesser, second-generation talents. What irked Judd even more than the derivative gesturalism of the so-called Tenth Streeth Touch was a rampant form of historical eclecticism, in which artists cobbled purportedly signature styles out of disparate, well-worn modes of abstraction. Judd’s contempt for this phenomenon was on full display in a 1961 review of Dorothy Eisner: “Criticism needs a large catalogue of the possible combinations of Cubism, Fauvism, Impressionism and later brands, so that a number could simply be given—10211, say; it would take several digits—and repetitious description discarded.”16 From this and other reviews from the period, it becomes clear that Judd encountered much work in which aspects were not specific and polarized, but rather muddied, anachronistic, and operating at cross-purposes.17 In this morass of benighted eclecticism, the achievement of someone like Bontecou, who successfully deployed aesthetic elements that “combine exponentially into an explicit quality and are the aspects of a single form” was all the more remarkable.18 This 1963 Bontecou review was also an early instance in which Judd began to theorize the advantages of three-dimensional work in meeting his aesthetic criteria. The relief mode dispelled illusionism and figure/ground relationships, so that “there is no field in which the structure or the image occurs; there is no supporting context. The entire shape, the structure and the image are coextensive.”19 In time, Judd would go on to argue more forcefully that three-dimensional work lent itself more naturally to his desired dispersal of aspects, as objects could more fully articulate their specific presence in real space than in two dimensions.20 However, while painting might have been at a disadvantage in Judd’s thinking, it did have resources at its disposal, which he delineated in reviews of his favorite painters. From the beginning of his critical practice, Judd identified pictorial space as a key criterion in weighing a painting’s merits—an unsurprising fact in light of the figure/ground investigations conducted in his own paintings at this time (fig. 3.1).

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Figure 3.1 Donald Judd (1928–1994), Untitled, oil on canvas, 67 1/2 × 67 1/2 in. (171.5 × 171.5 cm). © 2018 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image: Silvia Ros.

Early reviews reveal his sense of the diminishing spatial possibilities available to the medium, a conclusion that would motivate his own transition to three-dimensional work. For example, in an otherwise favorable review of Jack Youngerman, Judd noted the ineluctable ambiguity of the artist’s rough hewn planes: “A quibble at this time, and perhaps a quarrel for the future, is that after all the space involved is nearly all double, that is, read as either infinite space or a frontal plane.”21 He relates this spatial ambiguity to Mondrian, who, in Judd’s paradigm, is all but synonymous with a discredited tradition of European modernism.22 While Judd did allow for potentially new spatial solutions—such as the stippled fields of Milton Resnick, which he praised for intimating depth without sacrificing their overall unity of surface—he preferred painting that worked towards the elimination of space entirely.23 In his criticism, Stella and Alfred Jensen emerge as the two painters Judd considered to have most successfully achieved this goal. He even mentions Jensen in his review of Stella’s Copper paintings as an artist making a similar type of formal advance, which must stand as one of the very few occasions these two artists were ever linked in criticism from this period. Though very different from one another, both artists worked with a patternized application of paint determined by an a priori schema or logic. Stella’s repeated stripes and Jensen’s diagrammatic forms filled their canvases, choking out negative space and obviating chromatic passages that could be read as spatial. An Aluminum painting by Stella, we learn, “is something of an object, it is a single thing, not a field with something in it, and it has almost no space.”24 Jensen (fig. 3.2) manages to go one step further: Outside of the folded form produced by the quartering, there is no space. Many of Jensen’s paintings are thoroughly flat, are completely patterns. Jensen’s paintings are not radical inventions but this aspect is. There are no other paintings completely without space.25

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Figure 3.2 Alfred Jensen (1903–1981), Mayan Temple, Per II: Palenque, oil on canvas, 76 × 50 in. (193.1 × 127 cm). Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1968. © 2018 Estate of Alfred Jensen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Though Judd did not include Jensen in “Local History” or “Specific Objects”—his most comprehensive and synthetic accounts of advanced trends in recent art—he wrote about the painter with uncharacteristic enthusiasm: “Now and then a chance occurs for a narrow, subjective, categorical statement: Jensen is great.”26 Judd did not bestow compliments lightly, and such an unequivocal endorsement offers sufficient grounds for Jensen’s place in the Judd pantheon alongside the makers of specific objects, despite the relative infrequency of his appearances in the criticism.27 If Stella was a more frequent touchstone in Judd’s writing, he was also more problematic. James Meyer has documented the fissures that formed in their relationship as Stella courted both the literal and optical modes of visuality before ultimately throwing his weight behind the latter with his Irregular Polygons.28 With each new series, one can sense Judd gauging the way in which the works’ shape and facture emphasize or diminish its literal presence. For example, he expresses minor disappointment that the Coppers lack some of the Aluminums’ metallic stridency and that Stella neglected to paint the edges, an omission that “weakens the density.”29 The discussion of Stella in “Local History” reflects the artist’s contested status as a painter: “Frank Stella says

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that he is doing paintings, and his work could be considered as painting. Most of the works, though, suggest slabs, since they project more than usual, and since some are notched and some are shaped like letters.”30 Judd here describes the kind of hybrid entity that he would dub the “specific object” the following year. While a Stella possessed qualities of painting (“his work could be considered painting”), it also existed in sculptural terms (“slabs”). This passage contains a subtle—though I would suggest significant—ambiguity. In one reading, Judd claims Stella’s work as a specific object in spite of the artist’s own insistence that he remains a painter. Such a reading would seem to affirm the now standard account of Judd being the hardened literalist and Stella being the more equivocal of the two. However, one could also read this passage to say that a stripe painting’s status as painting and object were not mutually exclusive. Judd asserts the work’s object quality while also conceding that it “could be considered as painting.” One could take this to mean that certain forms of painting remained viable to literalist practice without necessarily sacrificing their identity qua painting. Indeed, “Specific Objects,” contrary to prevailing interpretations, made just such an allowance. As Roberta Smith recently observed, the version of “Specific Objects” published in the Complete Writings contains a crucial revision from the Arts Yearbook original.31 The former ends with an oddly perfunctory mention of Robert Morris and George Brecht—two artists about whom Judd was less than enthusiastic32—making for a rather enervated conclusion that is atypical for such a committed stylist.33 The latter, however, concludes with Judd’s account of Stella, and the result is a markedly different rhetorical swell: Stella’s shaped paintings involve several important characteristics of threedimensional work. The periphery of a piece and the lines inside correspond. The stripes are nowhere near being discrete parts. The surface is farther from the wall than usual, though it remains parallel to it. Since the surface is exceptionally unified and involves little or no space, the parallel plane is unusually distinct. The order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another. A painting isn’t an image. The shapes, the unity, projection, order and color are specific, aggressive and powerful.34 Published years after Stella abandoned any semblance of a literalist practice, the revised essay in the Complete Writings repositions this passage so that it becomes a preamble to Judd’s critique of painting (the following paragraph begins, “Painting and sculpture have become set forms. A fair amount of their meaning isn’t credible.”)—a shift in context that decisively alters the passage’s meaning and reflects his distaste for Stella’s change of course. However, the original—published a year before the debut of the Irregular Polygons—captures the profound significance Stella held for Judd at this time. Much of the language Judd uses to describe the striped paintings could easily—and indeed has been—applied to his own work, most notably, his notion of a “one thing after another” form of order. In an essay that does not once mention his own work, Stella’s paintings arguably functioned as a proxy for Judd’s art, exemplifying formal principles he was exploring at this time.35 As originally conceived, “Specific Objects” presents a Stella who was not an acolyte of a dying tradition but was rather one of Judd’s privileged makers of specific objects. Just as in “Local History,” Stella’s is a hybrid practice—“neither painting nor sculpture” but related to both. “A painting isn’t an image,” Judd writes, but in the age of literalism, painting had a new matrix of

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identities available to it: a “slab” for Stella, an obdurate “wall” or nebulous “area” for Robert Mangold, or for David Novros, a “painted place.” While Judd never reviewed an exhibition in which Novros participated, passages in the criticism offer hints as to what in particular he might have admired about the painter enough to commission a permanent addition to his SoHo residence. The mural was Novros’s first fresco, so Judd’s understanding of his practice would have been based largely on his then widely exhibited shaped canvases and fiberglass paintings, as well as their conversations in social settings. Judd’s criticism finds him growing increasingly skeptical about the shaped canvas’s potential as a viable path for painting’s future. Reviewing Lawrence Alloway’s 1965 exhibition The Shaped Canvas at the Guggenheim, he describes this mode as “one aspect in the development from painting to three-dimensional work” and suggests that to more genuinely capture its status as a kind of formalist way station, the curator should have included work by artists who followed through on its implications by abandoning painting for “relief and objects,” such as Bontecou, Chamberlain, Rauschenberg, and Oldenburg (and perhaps Judd himself). Though he praises Stella (represented in the show by five paintings), he argues that the shaped canvas “as a three-dimensional painting is unnecessary” and suggests that some work in the show would have been better served had it been made out of more “substantial materials.”36 Given this critique, one might reasonably assume that Judd saw the fresco as a means of encouraging a young painter to bypass this “unnecessary” stage for a more authentically literal practice. As will be seen, Novros himself viewed the work in just such terms. However, this could not have been the only factor behind the commission. To request a permanent addition to his home and studio from an artist making his first foray into an unfamiliar medium, Judd must have had some confidence in Novros that grew out of his admiration for his earlier shaped canvases. Indeed, much about Novros’s “portable murals,” as he called them, conformed to Judd’s aesthetic. Both artists were committed colorists, and Novros’s use of materials like Murano pigment, acrylic lacquer, and fiberglass echoed Judd’s own interest in industrial sourcing. Furthermore, Judd would have appreciated Novros’s use of the negative space between panels to incorporate the wall into the work. In a 1963 review of Gene Davis, he commented approvingly of the artist’s use of just such a tactic in his multi-paneled painting, Contrapuntal in Blue, writing: “I much like the incorporation of the wall into these. That has an unusual openness. It also solves the problem of figure and ground by getting rid of the rectangle.”37 Similarly, Novros’s panels dispensed with the rectangular “container,” as Judd would later call it, and projected figure/ground relations onto the literal support of the wall. His use of monochrome precluded the arbitrary relationships between painted and literal shape found in the works in The Shaped Canvas that met with Judd’s most strenuous disapproval. The SoHo fresco’s prominent passages of untouched plaster retained this sense of “openness” that Judd admired. Fresco’s surface unity also must have appealed to Judd. In his lengthy 1965 review of Kenneth Noland’s Jewish Museum retrospective, he commented approvingly on how the artist’s staining technique achieved this quality: As has been said often, the paint is soaked into the canvas; it’s in the material and not on top of it. If it were on top, it would be a second material and would create further and more complex space, which would require corresponding surroundings, not bare canvas—so on back to ordinary painting.38

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Judd viewed Noland’s staining differently from the painter’s modernist advocates, such as Greenberg, who saw it as the means by which color transcended its own materiality to achieve a purely optical expression.39 While both agreed that staining created a surface in which paint and canvas were coextensive, Judd saw this material unity as enhancing the work’s literal presence, allowing blank expanses of raw canvas to be coplanar with the painted bands of color, thereby negating illusionistic space. By this logic, fresco must have been even more appealing to Judd than staining, as it was a medium in which paint was neither on top of the support, nor in it, but rather of it—an a priori material unity of color and support—or as Novros has phrased it: [E]ven the medium is the wall itself, because it encapsulates the pigment in the calcium carbonate and the sand. So the painting becomes structurally part of the wall—it isn’t dyed. People think it bleeds into the wall. That’s not what happens. There is a very complex and interesting process by which the pigment is held.40

Discovering the “Painted Place” Novros has woven wall painting into the very fabric of his artistic origins. Born in Los Angeles to artist parents steeped in early 20th-century European modernism, the young Novros, encouraged by his parents, painted yearly murals on the stucco walls of the family garage.41 After a period of flirtation with filmmaking while studying at the University of Southern California, he committed himself to painting, and his early encounters with the landmarks of art history only served to reinforce his primal orientation towards the wall. A room of Clyfford Stills at the L.A. County Museum of Art provided an early example of abstract painting aspiring to a mural status: Very, very large, of course, paintings, one on each wall in the room. I was knocked out by them. It wasn’t even so much the paintings themselves—I can’t remember them specifically—but it was the experience of going to a room and seeing paintings, which were taking the place of the wall, more or less.42 This formative experience would shape his mature understanding of the Abstract Expressionists as “muralists who didn’t have walls.”43 Such a statement serves as yet another example of the profound multivalence Abstract Expressionism held for artists of this generation. For Judd, the best fifties painting asserted a literal declaration of material presence; for Mangold, it dialectically sublated painting’s identity as image and object; and for Novros, it was a frustrated muralism—publicly scaled painting denied a permanent, public site: [T]hey were all interested in that kind of public expression of a private idea, on a huge scale. . . . They were unable to get the jobs. They tried: if you read their histories, you see them trying to do wall painting, or architectural things, but never able to really get it to happen. So I think they built that into their paintings. So their paintings became places.44 While his introduction to Still was eye-opening, Novros’s first immersive experience with the New York School came in 1961, when he studied in the Yale Norfolk summer program. Working alongside future prominent New York artists such as Chuck

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Close, Vija Celmins, and Brice Marden (with whom he formed an enduring friendship) instilled his practice with an ethos of professionalism and community he felt was absent in Los Angeles, whose art scene at the time he has dismissed as provincial and cliquish, and visits to New York galleries and museums fleshed out his knowledge of art history and introduced him to the major contemporary galleries.45 While many of his classmates graduated from the summer program to the university’s MFA track, Novros returned to USC, completing his undergraduate degree in 1963, after which he departed for the nine-month European sojourn that would decisively alter the course of his career. Novros has described this trip as a trans-cultural, trans-historical affirmation of the power of working in situ. The signal revelation came at the Alhambra in Granada: It was going to the Alhambra that changed my view of what I wanted to be as a painter. Actually, that’s not accurate; it reunited me with my feelings for wall painting. . . . [It] taught me that painting could be something other than a rectangle hanging on a wall in a museum or in a gallery. I saw for the first time how a painting didn’t have to be even made of paint.46 The Alhambra’s tiled chambers (fig. 3.3) catalyzed his understanding of site-specific color that is made in response to the light and other natural conditions of a given location. He saw the walls as an immersive work of art that needed to be experienced “kinesthetically”—a mode of spectatorship to which he would aspire not only for his frescos, but for his modular works as well.47 Furthermore, the Alhambra broadened his thinking about painting’s material possibilities. Even if the tiles were not painting as traditionally defined, they forged a powerful unity of color, plane, and site, against

Figure 3.3 The Alhambra, Granada, Spain.

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which easel painting would always be found wanting. Novros traversed the continent over the next nine months, and the art that most captivated him bolstered these early insights: the Léger Museum in Biot, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the Galla Placidia Mausoleum in Ravenna, and many more. Islamic to Christian, Ancient Roman to modern, each new experience intensified his belief that working in situ—the marriage of image and place—represented the pinnacle of artistic expression. What is noteworthy about Novros’s European sojourn for our purposes is his ability to formulate these insights in the language of Minimalist aesthetics. In the muralist practices he observed in Europe, he saw a successful resolution of optical and literal modalities that allowed for an active, embodied spectator: The whole question of illusion, for example, of what’s flat in painting and what isn’t, could be resolved. In fact, illusion could be totally synonymous with physical reality, which is a wonderful realization. I’ve always had to think about how to synthesize spatial experience in a painting. That you could possibly paint something that could be synonymous with the actual physical experience. That seemed to be a very freeing kind of idea for me.48 Like Mangold, Novros saw the literal/optical dichotomy as the central challenge facing contemporary painting. Whereas Mangold pursued strategies of dialectical synthesis, Novros sought to nullify this opposition entirely. Wall painting rendered image and material coextensive, transposing figure/ground relationships onto the architectural surround. Such a painting made illusion “physical,” or to use another Novros locution, it negated the “separation between a picture of a thing and the thing.”49 While such a formulation held obvious pertinence to the practice of sixties abstraction, it was born out of his experiences with historical work, even that considered to be conventionally illusionistic, as seen in his account of the Scrovegni Chapel: What you have to understand is that the ceiling of this place is of a certain blue. And that certain blue is continued throughout the entire wall panels [sic] in the back as well. So that a rhythm is developed—a schema—which is synonymous with the rhythm of the story of the life of the Virgin Mary and of Christ. And the way that you see them around the room—the way you read them—is part also of the structure. You can’t separate what was formal and what, in other words, is literary. It’s impossible.50 In this reading, architectural structure, painted form, and narrative content form a complex unity that directly bears on the spatial experience of the viewer—an ideal to which he would aspire in his mature work. This desired conflation of the “formal” and the “literary” might sound peculiar for an artist steeped in sixties American abstraction (particularly since Greenberg had established for many—a good number of his detractors included—that advanced art expurgated the literary), but as will be seen, this adherence to a “literary” form of abstraction would set Novros apart from many of his peers. The Vietnam War curtailed the artist’s travels, when in late 1963, shortly after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he arrived in Venice to a letter informing him that he had been drafted. He returned to the United States and, after six months of service at two domestic army bases, settled in New York in 1965, having been assigned to a “control group” that could be deployed overseas at a moment’s notice. With the specter of war always looming over his shoulder, Novros began his mature career as a New York painter.51

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The art Novros observed on his return to the United States resonated with his recent travels in compelling—and, to a contemporary reader, unexpected—ways. For example, he recalled seeing the stateside exhibition of that year’s American pavilion for the São Paolo Bienal—organized by Walter Hopps and featuring the work of Barnett Newman, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Larry Poons.52 While the mural scale of Newman’s paintings conformed to his earlier understanding of Abstract Expressionism’s architectural ambitions, Novros’s response to the artists of his own generation was even more revealing. The exhibition featured the work of a number of young artists who were rethinking the materials of fine art: an early fabricated Judd, a sprayed lacquer on Masonite painting by Bengston, a Bell coated glass box, and a Stella stripe painting. While many American critics expressed concerns about the imperious aura these works’ cool and impersonal surfaces would project abroad in the tense Cold War geopolitical climate,53 Novros delighted in their consonance with his recent discoveries abroad: That stuff [in the exhibition] made perfect sense to me as related to the kind of thing I had seen in Europe. . . . I had been looking at Roman floor mosaics, and wall mosaics in Madrid. I had spent a lot of time looking at them. I was very influenced by them. These paintings, especially those by Stella, you would see geometric, free-floating things on the wall—they reminded me of the mosaics, the things I had seen.54 In short, Novros did not see Minimalism as a historical rupture, as did so many of its critics and, indeed, its artists. Instead, he saw it as a new episode in a centuries-old artistic tradition of material specificity, in which a work’s literal presence was of a piece with its imagistic content.

Novros at Park Place When Novros first began exhibiting in New York galleries, he had already arrived at a mode of abstraction that reflected a sophisticated understanding of current aesthetic trends. His earlier student paintings included a period of Van Gogh–inspired landscape painting, as well as a lyrical, dripping mode of abstraction derived from Pollock.55 However, the paintings he displayed at his first exhibition at Park Place Gallery in 1965 were not in any meaningful way a direct continuation of these earlier bodies of work. Instead, they emerged as a synthesis of his transformative experiences in Europe and his interpretation of recent developments in advanced abstraction, particularly as manifested in the work of Judd and Stella. Novros has recounted arriving in New York already aspiring to a muralist practice. In the absence of any commissions, he developed his shaped canvases as a compromise between his true ambition and the lived necessities of being an emerging artist dependent on the gallery system for exposure and remuneration.56 He has called these works “portable murals,” which is to say paintings scaled to the wall without being fixed to one particular site. He took his inspiration for this approach from the cutouts of Henri Matisse that he observed in Nice (fig. 3.4): I had seen the Matisse paper cutouts in Nice, the Apollo cutouts especially, and I got the idea from that in a way. It was a way of modernizing it, because you could put them up, take them down, move them around. You could use the wall and end up

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Figure 3.4 Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Apollo, 1953, gouache découpé, collage on white painted paper glued to canvas, 129 × 167 in. (327 × 423 cm). Purchased 1968 with contribution from The Friends of Moderna Museet, The Gerard Bonnier Foundation, and Carl-Bertel Nathhorst Scientific Foundation. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © 2018 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

with a mural of some kind. . . . I thought I could do that with canvases, that is why I started making shaped canvases in separate pieces that could be hung together.57 Like the cutouts, Novros’s shaped canvases “use the wall” as a pictorial substrate, establishing a mutual engagement between wall and work. A letter to his parents from 1966 suggests he saw this work as a genuine breakthrough: “I have discovered (i.e. invented) some new drawings that surpass any of the thoughts I’ve had concerning a direct confrontation with the wall space vs. painting idea.”58 This letter tells us that Novros’s overriding concern at this point was the articulation of a compelling dynamic between a work’s conceptual identity (its “painting idea”) and the architectural environment. Furthermore, this ideal was to be achieved through drawing, which is to say, by way of a painting’s shape. While large rectangular canvases that filled the wall—such as those he admired by the Abstract Expressionists—arguably could have more faithfully replicated a mural experience, Novros identified shape as the decisive factor in a work’s integration with architectural space.

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Figure 3.5 Installation of Mark di Suvero and David Novros at the Park Place Gallery, January 23–February 24, 1966; John D. Schiff, photographer. Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc., and Paula Cooper Gallery records, 1961–2006. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

His first exhibition at Park Place Gallery in 1965 (fig. 3.5) found the artist experimenting with a wide variety of silhouettes, several of which appear as sketches in his letters home (fig. 3.6). These works featured pairs of shaped canvases, in which the units were subjected to rotations and mirror reversals, as well as more complex arrangements of multiple units. His work 2:16, which would be included in Systemic Painting the following year, prefigured the modular perpendicular forms that would become the preferred idiom for most of his mature work in the sixties and seventies (fig. 3.7).59 Taken as a whole, the exhibition demonstrated a range of approaches to engaging the architectural support. A work like 4:32 (fig. 3.8) emblazoned the wall with a heraldic presence, whereas others, such as 4:24 (fig. 3.9), incorporated geometric forms of negative space into their composition. He sprayed these works with multiple layers of vinyl or acrylic lacquer, often mixed with metal powders. As David Bourdon observed in his review of the exhibition, the colors were “less fixated” than they initially appeared, so that, for example, a layer of ultramarine admixed with bronze powder sprayed over a red base layer resulted in a “luxuriant metallic brown with a gold-flecked opalescence.”60 Novros joined Park Place at a turning point in its evolution. The cooperative gallery had recently moved from its original downtown location at 79 Park Place, where the group first coalesced in 1963, to 542 West Broadway in the West Village. The move coincided with a change in gallery structure. In its downtown incarnation, the gallery

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Figure 3.6 Letter from David Novros to his father, Lester Novros, dated “12 Jan” (dated 1966 by archivist). David Novros papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

operated very informally out of the building in which Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Dean Fleming, and Leo Valledor had studios, each to a floor. The three artists knew each other from their time as students at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), and with their former classmates Peter Forakis and Tamara Melcher, as well as Mark di Suvero, Edwin Ruda, Anthony Magar, and Robert Grosvenor, they formed the gallery’s initial roster.61 As Ruda recalled of those early years: Whenever someone had finished a piece, or a few of us had finished a piece, we would borrow a truck from a mutual friend, help each other very cooperatively. . . . So we had an ongoing little show there, so you could see [how] the mutual influence just grows.62 This casual atmosphere gave way to a more structured, disciplined ethos when its original lease expired and the group hatched plans for a new location. The artists incorporated as Art Research, Inc., an entity whose primary directive was the management of Park Place: The Gallery of Art Research, Inc. They enlisted a group of six collectors, Albert and Vera List, John D. Murchison, Allen Guiberson, Virginia Dwan, and Patrick Lannan, who

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Figure 3.7 David Novros (b. 1941), 2:16, 1965, acrylic on canvas, two panels, overall: 132 × 192 in. (335.3 × 487.8 cm). © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo by Kevin Noble.

would pay a set annual sum that would cover the gallery’s expenses in exchange for one work per year by each of the artists. Paula Cooper was the corporation’s president and, after a short stint by John Gibson, also its director.63 While the gallery continued the periodic group shows from its earlier location that included a wide variety of artists beyond its core roster, they began a regular series of two-artist member exhibitions, pairing one sculptor with one painter, that became the staple of their programming. Novros was brought into the Park Place fold by Myers and di Suvero, with whom he became acquainted through mutual West Coast contacts, Carlos Villa and Robert Duran.64 The gallery announced his addition to its ranks in a press release circulated in advance of the move to its West Village headquarters. In addition to publicizing the gallery’s new address, the press release was received by critics as a manifesto declaring the group’s bold new aesthetic: The possibilities of dealing with space, material, and color in a unique and contemporary way drew our attention. We saw the visual phenomenon of the city as if we had never before opened our eyes. Technology became a landscape and with it, the dynamics of time, space, and velocity. “Scientific American” was passed around as well as literature on math, physics, structural engineering, and symbolic logic.65 While the Park Place artists never adhered to a cohesive aesthetic agenda, certain members at this time did attempt to advance a gallery ideology that was loosely

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Figure 3.8 David Novros (b. 1941), 4:32, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 144 × 156 in. (365.8 × 396.2 cm). Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Lannan Foundation, 1999. © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

scientific in nature, centered around topics such as the fourth dimension, space travel, Einstein’s theories of relativity, etc.66 This aspect of the gallery’s program prompted Robert Smithson to call it “a space-time monastic order, where they research the cosmos modeled after Einstein.”67 In the manifold hard-edged geometries pursued by its artists, several critics saw a collective effort at formulating a new abstract vocabulary for the Space Age. As David Bourdon wrote, “The Park Place artists take the Space Age for granted and try to get it across in their work. Key terms in their phraseology are ‘space-warp,’ ‘four-dimensional color,’ ‘time-line,’ ‘optic energy,’ ‘eye-ibel,’ ‘weightlessness’ and ‘peripheral vision.’”68 However, the same critics generally expressed indifference or skepticism towards the group’s claims to real scientific achievement. Bourdon shrugged, “Much of this is over my head,” while Corinne Robbins, who also admired much about the artists, acknowledged that “little in the way of a concerted space-age movement exists down on West Broadway.”69 Lucy Lippard—whose allegiances at this time lay with the artistic circle of Mangold, LeWitt, Hesse, and her then husband, Robert Ryman—dismissed both the art and its attendant ideology as mere cant: [T]he Park Place painters are, with few exceptions, bogged down in theory; their work tends to the pedantic despite their almost evangelical fervor to impart to their audience a visual breakthrough, with the help of scientific discoveries.70

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Figure 3.9 David Novros (b. 1941), 4:24, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 92 1/2 × 100 3/8 × 1 5/8 in. (235 × 255 × 4.1 cm). Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Lannan Foundation, 1999. © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Novros proved to be an uneasy fit at Park Place. While he has spoken of feeling a certain “synergy” at a gallery populated by so many West Coast transplants and of being particularly proud of its invitational group shows, his art never meshed well with the gallery’s aura of scientism or its growing ideological thrust. The friction with his peers was arguably apparent from the outset, as evidenced by the pictorial spread accompanying Bourdon’s comprehensive introduction to the group in his article, “E = MC2 à Go-Go” in Art News, published shortly after their move in January 1966. The photographs by Fred W. McDarrah featured a selection of the artists standing in front of or alongside their works, a conceit that in many cases served to dramatize the art’s spatial dynamics. Frosty Myers leans at an angle parallel to his large steel and plastic sculpture, echoing its role as architectural hypotenuse spanning floor and wall (fig. 3.10). Posing behind his painted steel sculpture, Anthony Magar stands in a doubly compressed space, framed by both the work’s crystalline lattice and the acute angle it forms with the slanted attic ceiling (fig. 3.11). Edwin Ruda is captured mid-stride as he walks across a wall of his paintings, literalizing the sense of velocity created by their attenuated geometries (fig. 3.12). Tamara Melcher is shot, brush in hand, from above at a raking angle, exaggerating her paintings’ perspectival ambiguities (fig. 3.13). Effects such as these prompted Corinne Robins to preface her article on

Figure 3.10 Forrest Myers with sculpture, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Licensed by Getty Images.

Figure 3.11 Anthony Magar with sculpture, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Licensed by Getty Images.

Figure 3.12 Edwin Ruda with paintings, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Licensed by Getty Images.

Figure 3.13 Tamara Melcher with paintings, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 23. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Licensed by Getty Images.

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Figure 3.14 David Novros with paintings, reproduced in David Bourdon, “E = MC2 à Go-Go,” ArtNews 64 (January 1966): 22. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Licensed by Getty Images. Paintings © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the group with the lede, “Walls and rooms shift and swell down on West Broadway as speed-lines and space-curves mix.”71 Novros, on the other hand, stands upright, arms crossed, in front of an array of three paintings, each staking out their presence on the wall with a declarative frontality (fig. 3.14). Whereas many of the photographs in the spread perform or otherwise hypostatize the art objects’ spatio-temporal manipulations, Novros’s comes across as remarkably understated, even static—a clear indication his concerns lay elsewhere. Novros also bristled at the politics of cooperative gallery membership and particularly resented the public statements issued on behalf of the group. “I don’t want somebody talking for me all the time and telling people what I’m thinking. That [Park Place] was my first experience with that sort of thing,” he recalled.72 His frustrations with the recent attention from the art press were made plain in a letter to Paula Cooper, in which he complained of members who incessantly spew dogma which, for some reason, is gobbled up by the various chroniclers about town and comes out as some sort of group manifesto. . . . [Park Place] isn’t a shrine or a panacea and I have always detested fraternity houses so what can a gallery be?73 These remarks were symptomatic of tensions within the gallery that would ultimately lead to its closure. In his postmortem on Park Place, Edwin Ruda attributed this infighting to the increased institutionalization that accompanied its relocation to the West Village: The corporation as the embodiment of rambling ideas of ten individual artists who expect to achieve a certain amount of unified action. The organization is no longer archaic or simple. After one full year of artist-member shows, murmurs of

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David Novros discontent. The whole purpose and function of the gallery called into question. For some our original purpose had completely escaped us. We were being duped by our own self-interests For one thing, we were not functioning at an experimental level but operating much like any other gallery.74

If Novros stood apart from the Park Place mainstream, it should be stressed that his art at this time did not necessarily look out of place on the gallery’s walls. In fact, being paired with Mark di Suvero for his gallery debut proved to be a particularly agreeable context for his early work. Installation photographs reveal an environment of dynamic two- and three-dimensional forms that powerfully activated architectural space—quite literally in the case of di Suvero, whose spinning Laurie’s Love Seat (a sculptural tire swing that invited viewer participation) would have transformed Novros’s paintings into a vertiginous panorama. The two artists shared a desire to compose in space that could be understood as an extension of Abstract Expressionist principles. Corinne Robins rightly described Novros’s conception of the wall at this time as “a field of action,” invoking Harold Rosenberg’s rhetoric of action painting, and quotes the artist ascribing his shaped canvases to “a need not to compose within a frame.”75 The appendage-like forms thrusting across the wall functioned analogously to di Suvero’s suspended beams and other assorted industrial elements, which Donald Judd memorably related to painterly modes of composition: “A beam thrusts, a piece of iron follows a gesture; together they form a naturalistic and anthropomorphic image. The space corresponds.”76 If Park Place brought Novros early recognition in the New York art world (he was only 24 at the time he joined the gallery), it distanced him somewhat from Minimalism’s emergent aesthetic and discursive fields. While Grace Glueck described the gallery as an “out-post of ‘minimal,’ ‘pure,’ or ‘systemic’ art,” critics more attuned to Minimalist aesthetics saw the Park Place artists pursuing a constellation of issues that were decidedly different from those of Judd, Andre, Stella, and the like.77 As David Bourdon wrote, Nor does their [Park Place’s] work lend itself to purist interpretations. The group as a whole is not very receptive to one of the most current recent manifestations, the widespread reductive tendency toward “minimal” or “ABC art,” as exemplified by Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre. Their mute, uninflected structures are often embodiments of solid geometric shapes. The expressive content in “ABC” art is concealed behind impassive surfaces that remain stationary without hint of movement. The Park Place artists have more affirmative views and want to transcend the object; none of them sees his work as an act of denial or depersonalization.78 Lucy Lippard offered a less forgiving assessment, deeming their work no different from the scores of practitioners of hard-edged and Op modes of abstraction that filled even the city’s most conventional art spaces.79 In truth, while Park Place’s renown has faded somewhat, its artists often showed alongside canonical Minimalists, making Glueck’s characterization of the group at the time seem reasonable, if not accurate. Park Place artists were prominently featured in both Systemic Painting (Novros, Ruda, Fleming) and Primary Structures (Forakis, Grosvenor, Myers), and Minimalists such as LeWitt, Smithson, and Andre (who showed an orange Styrofoam beam sculpture in a shared exhibition with Novros) participated in the gallery’s group shows.

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If Novros was associated in the minds of many observers with Park Place’s “speedlines and space-curves,” he was not shy about where his true allegiances lay. Robins’ article describes his appreciation for Larry Poons and Stella, the latter of whom he identifies as “the painter who comes most away from composing within the canvas.” He goes on to cite “the ideas of Don Judd and the Moorish paintings he saw in Spain” as his greatest influences.80 Clearly then, Novros saw himself as being engaged with the issues of Minimalist aesthetics, a fact that would go largely unrecognized by critics until the following year, when he had his first solo exhibition away from Park Place.

The Dwan Shows That exhibition would occur at Virginia Dwan’s gallery in Novros’s native Los Angeles and came about through her involvement as a patron of Park Place. The Dwan show marked a return to an important moment in the artist’s introduction to modern art. Novros has recalled first encountering the work of Ad Reinhardt at Dwan’s earlier gallery location in L.A.: I guess when I must have been a senior in college, ’62 or so, Virginia Dwan had a gallery in Los Angeles. It was not the gallery that I later showed in, but it was in Westwood. . . . And I was walking down the street. . . . I didn’t know she had a gallery at the time—and the stores there have windows that lead you back into the store, like shoe stores sometimes have. And in these four windows were four black squares propped up on easels. I didn’t know what they were. I had no idea what it was. I began looking at them and looking at them. Then they began resolving. I didn’t know who Reinhardt was. They began resolving as color. I went in and asked, “What is that?” I didn’t even know what it was! “Yeah, those are paintings by Ad Reinhardt.” I said, “Wow. Those are amazing.” I went back and looked at them some more, and some more, and some more, and then ironically, it’s only 6 or 7 years later I was having my own show with her in this beautiful new space she had.81 While Novros does not consider the Dwan show to be a response to his discovery of Reinhardt, it is at least a notable coincidence that he took it as an opportunity to work with a similarly nuanced form of monochromy—though now in white. Dwan flew Novros out to L.A. for the exhibition, and after stretching the canvases in the garage of his USC classmate, the painter and fellow Angeleno, Paul Mogensen, he painted all but one of the works for the show in a spray booth he constructed in a studio Dwan reserved for artists.82 While not properly site-specific, in that the paintings could be sold and hung on collectors’ walls, they were conceived in response to the dimensions and lighting conditions of the space—a fact made particularly perspicuous by the pairing of two 24-foot-long paintings on the gallery’s longest wall. While each painting could exist independently and apart from the ensemble, he gave significant consideration to the entire exhibition experience, viewing the works holistically as an immersive environment. Commenting on this approach to exhibition preparation, Novros has said: All of my exhibitions, when I made exhibitions, were made with the intention to appear to be a contiguous painting experience. I’ve never been interested so much

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David Novros in making individual pictures. . . . In fact, many of the artists that I knew in the ’60s, when they had an exhibition, they tried to make the exhibition have a kind of unity, not just a matter of theme but a matter of poetry, how you experience them.83

A key change in Novros’s practice that enhanced the exhibition’s environmental quality was his discovery of the pearlescent Murano pigment. Produced by the Mearl Corporation, this material had typically been used in cosmetics and automotive paints. Novros chanced upon it while shopping at Harry’s Paint Store on West Broadway, a commercial paints purveyor popular with downtown artists.84 “I saw a tin can and on the edge of the tin can I saw this paint lopping over the side,” he has recalled, “It was kind of going pink, green, clear, and all this stuff.”85 These chromatic fluctuations that Novros describes as “magical” were produced by lead platelets that varyingly reflected and refracted light depending on the position of the viewer, producing a certain color at one angle and then its complement at another. He recognized the nacreous material from its use by the custom car hobbyists in his native Los Angeles, though he did not have any firsthand experience with it, as he did not share the fascination with this subculture harbored by so many of his fellow Californian artists at this time. Indeed, it is a curious aspect of Novros’s reception that despite his embrace of Murano pigment and his subsequent use of fiberglass, his work was seldom tagged with the term “Finish Fetish” or any other designation commonly associated with West Coast Minimalism.86 In its pure form, Murano was sold as a powder that could be mixed into paint or a clear lacquer or resin. Novros began each of the new works in the Dwan show by applying multiple layers of a white vinyl lacquer that he discovered in a store that sold paints for detention facilities and psychiatric facilities. Told that it was the “toughest paint [the salesperson] had ever seen,”87 he sprayed multiple layers to form a dense, “rubbery” skin that fully concealed the unprimed cotton duck support.88 He took the additional step of sanding between coats to create a “pebbly” texture that would react strongly with the Murano, which he then sprayed in multiple layers mixed with the untinted version of the same vinyl lacquer.89 The resulting surfaces underwent striking modulations of hue as the viewer moved laterally across its surface, with different types of Murano producing different color complements. For example, 6:59 appeared blue then yellow, while 6:30 (Plate 7) shaded from pink to green. These changes, which are nearly impossible to capture in reproduction, would wash across the painting’s surface in seemingly atomized tonal gradations not unlike those found in Mangold’s Areas, though rendered dynamic through the activating movements of the viewer. Their reflectivity could change as well, appearing matte in diffuse light and glossy when lit directly. Novros embraced the contingent nature of these effects and was particularly enamored with the idea that color could be a function of the viewer’s movements: I felt that this Murano stuff was consistent with the kinesthetic experience of the painting. Because you never saw the painting the same way from any one place. It forced you to move along the painting in order to experience it, to see the way light was going to interact with the material.90 In addition to the use of Murano, the Dwan show marked another important development in Novros’s practice. All of the new works deployed modular components in

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such a way that the shapes of the interstices varyingly echoed those of the modular units themselves, creating a kind of equilibrium between positive and negative space reminiscent of a Judd stack, though without the strict adherence to identical modules. The resulting silhouettes more boldly integrated the wall into the very structure of the composition. This kind of engagement of the architectural support had been one of Novros’s preoccupations in his paintings at Park Place, but at Dwan it became a much more prominent feature of the work.91 His work 4:20, for example, consists of four polygonal arms that reach laterally across the wall to form two large pockets of negative space that approximate the outlines of the canvas units. Similarly, 6:32 (fig. 3.15) creates a progression of ascending and descending lengths of positive and negative space of identical width. The Murano pigment enhanced the paintings’ interaction with the architecture, as it produced an interstitial halation that made the walls appear as if they were somehow painted with light. The year before Novros’s Dwan show, Michael Fried theorized a related form of symbiosis between painting and support under the rubric of “deductive structure”—a unity of painted and literal form, in which the former is derived, or is in some capacity a function of, the latter. In a Noland painting, for example, one learns that the main motif and the colored field [are brought] into a truly active, mutually reciprocal relation in regard to both color and structure—with the consequence that it is sometimes hard, if not actually impossible, to determine where an individual painting’s coloristic effects leave off and structure begins.92 With his Dwan show, Novros aspired to a similar “mutually reciprocal relation” between painting and support, transposing Fried’s color/structure dynamic onto the

Figure 3.15 David Novros (b. 1941), VI:XXXII, 1966 (repainted in 1990), vinyl lacquer paint on shaped canvases, six parts; 14 ft. 7 1/4 in. × 6 ft. 9 3/4 in. (445.1 × 207.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Charles Cowles. Digital image. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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relationship between a painting’s literal shape and the wall. While Fried understood deductive structure as a means by which painting could transcend its own materiality to achieve a strictly optical address, Novros saw it as a way for painting to better activate architectural space. If many of the Park Place works related to the wall in a figure/ground capacity, the Dwan paintings made the architecture an equal actor in their formal mechanics. This architectural mode of deductive structure insisted on an embodied, mobile spectator—a crucial difference from Fried’s model. The Murano pigment further enhanced the kinesthetic nature of the paintings, as its color shifts only revealed themselves with movement that unfolded in time. If Fried could argue, against Judd, that Stella’s metallic paint, “despite its implications of materiality, in fact renders [his] paintings curiously disembodied,” Novros’s Murano made his paintings unequivocally corporeal and temporal.93 Though the Dwan show engendered an embodied mode of spectatorship, its particular phenomenological address differed from that explored by some of Novros’s most prominent contemporaries. A letter to his father, in which he discusses his recent reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception, offers insight onto his understanding of the act of beholding his paintings. This anthology of the philosopher’s late writings, translated into English in 1964, contained his essay on painting, “Eye and Mind,” about which Novros wrote: While on the one hand I think he writes very well and has some profound thoughts about painting (for a non-painter), on the other hand, he leaves out a great deal (i.e. the translation of perception to “act” which is primal-for-real) or confuses the issue by remaining fussy on the differences between sensing & perceiving (this is especially tricky since there might even be a finite period between the two which has not been defined). In the end tho (sic.), I just don’t believe he really knows what it is to change sensing to perceiving to acting (or how to make “art”).94 This passage asserts an argument, however inchoate, about perception’s role in the act of painting. Merleau-Ponty’s essay describes painting as an expression of an individual subjectivity’s situatedness in the world—its interweaving of body, mind, and eye. “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings,” he writes. “To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.”95 Later in the essay, he describes painting’s relationship to experience as “autofigurative,” a meta-perceptual expression of “how the things become things, how the world becomes world.”96 While Novros would have undoubtedly approved of the philosopher’s insistence on perception’s corporeal foundation, it seems he found this formulation too passive, objecting to the idea that a painting could be merely indexical to the perceptual apparatus, a material residue of vision.97 In his letter, Novros faults Merleau-Ponty for insufficiently distinguishing “sensing” from “perceiving”—a peculiar objection given that the former is not one of the philosopher’s operative terms in the essay. Sensing, for Novros, appears to be the body’s passive reception of sense data, which the artist must translate into perception and then action—higher-order operations that set the aesthetic object apart from prosaic reality.98 A comparison with one of

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Novros’s peers who was thinking through similar issues at this time throws into relief the spectatorial implications of this conception of painting. In his 1964 Green Gallery show, Robert Morris, then very much influenced by the early writings of Merleau-Ponty, declared the work of art to be indistinguishable from the quotidian objects of our perception. As Annette Michelson argued, the gray plywood sculptures’ phenomenological address to an embodied spectator challenged the idealist dimension of traditional aesthetics: “Morris’s questioning of a self-contained system of virtual space is impelled by the recognition of the most profound and general sense in which our seeing is linked to our sense of ourselves as being bodies in space.”99 Like Morris, Novros also insisted on the link between seeing and “our sense of ourselves as being bodies in space,” and yet he aspired to what was arguably one of art history’s most storied modes—the “painted place,” a transcendent union of art and architecture that lifted the viewer out of the mundane and into the rarefied world of the aesthetic. Indeed, the Dwan show and Morris’s Green Gallery show present an instructive comparison. Both, after all, were monochrome installations designed in response to a particular site, featuring geometric objects painted with an undifferentiated surface that betrayed no sign of the artist’s hand. But while Morris trafficked exclusively and provocatively in the profane, Novros reached for the otherworldly. From certain angles, the paintings’ vinyl lacquer echoed the color and texture of the white gallery walls and were not dissimilar in character to Morris’s tough, commercially painted surfaces. Yet the movements of the ambulatory spectator revealed not the mundane spatial relationships called forth by Morris, but rather a scintillating play of light and color, so that the eye was awakened by the body’s engagement of space. Here, too, we find Novros bridging literalist and modernist aesthetics, conjoining the former’s insistence on embodied spectatorship with the latter’s ideal of optical revelation. Between the white monochromy, impersonal facture, and metallic paint, critics were quick to identify the Dwan show as a new entry to the Minimalist field. Artforum’s John Coplans, in what was the most sustained piece about the artist to date, recognized Novros’s participation in an artistic arena in which, “[o]bviously, both Stella and Donald Judd (and more recently, Carl Andre) are making the most important moves.”100 Henry Seldis, writing in the Los Angeles Times, complimented the artist for being able to “somehow . . . extend the possibilities of minimal art beyond the threshold of boredom,”101 repeating the now familiar formulation of Minimalism— previously found in Canaday’s and Bourdon’s reviews of Mangold—as an attenuated phenomenon in which art steadily exhausted its resources in a march towards the unaesthetic. One reason Novros’s art was capable of staving off utter boredom, in Seldis’s estimation, was that, despite its modularity, it retained principles of composition: Though the canvas wedges .  .  . relate to similar productions by his contemporaries, he rejects their being moved around at random by spectators and collectors and thus retains final control over his statements, which, more than any I have seen in this direction so far, explore the assumed potentialities of the wall in relation to interrupted paintings.102 Because Novros resisted the strict seriality of an Andre or Judd, Seldis could argue that he had not abdicated his responsibility as an artist. The units could not be “moved around at random” by any anonymous agent (though, of course, no

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canonical Minimalist, with the possible exception of Morris, would have consented to such an arrangement), meaning that Novros had “done the work” of authorship. Despite their lack of perceptible facture, the units’ unique arrangements required the touch of the artist, thus sparing them from being considered an anti-art provocation. If these works retained elements of traditional aesthetics, they nonetheless did not look like paintings in any conventional sense of the term, and critics consistently commented on their object-like qualities. John Coplans’s review revealed the extent to which Stella’s work, particularly as interpreted by Judd, framed the debate about painting’s objecthood for the broader critical establishment. Novros was sensitive to issues of objecthood as well, but he understood the matter rather differently from his peers. He recalled: The thickness of the object was a real problem. I found that . . . I couldn’t get the object thin enough to disappear. The thinner I got it, coincidentally made it the more intensely object-like, oddly enough. I developed this thickness as a way of projecting the light off the wall.103 His use of thick stretcher bars as a means of overcoming objecthood conflicts with Judd’s claim that increased depth brought painting into a relief mode. This would appear to align Novros more closely with Stella, who also argued that increased physical bulk enhanced the dematerializing effects of his paint. And yet unlike Stella, Novros took exquisite care in his treatment of the edges, painting them and concealing all seams at the corners. Novros himself has acknowledged the significance of this difference: [I]n Stella’s paintings of this time, which I was obviously familiar with, there was this quality of the surface projecting, and no interest in the edge. But for me that was unacceptable because the edge was where it met the wall. . . . And I had to do something that would keep that believable for me, you know, as mural.104 For Stella, increased stretcher depth enhanced opticality by asserting the painting’s frontal plane, thereby obviating the need to paint the edges.105 In a review that signaled their future schism, Judd criticized this omission on the grounds that it detracted from the work’s literalist identity, writing that it “denie[d] the relief and also weaken[ed] the density.”106 By painting the edges, Novros heeded Judd’s admonition, not out of deference for the relief mode, but rather to better mediate the paintings’ engagement of the architectural support. A painted edge made the work contiguous with the wall, denying the frontal, instantaneous spectatorship demanded of Greenbergian orthodoxy and, by extension, acknowledging the mobile viewer of architecturally scaled paintings, for whom a sidelong view of an edge would be just one of a nearly limitless number of permissible vantage points. However, to a critic like Coplans, steeped in the debates surrounding Stella and Judd yet unfamiliar with Novros’s intentions, painted edges clearly connoted aspirations to objecthood. So thoroughly did these two older artists inflect his reading of the Dwan paintings that he was largely unresponsive to their environmental qualities and intimations of muralism.107 Coplans did note that the works’ large scale exceeded “the normal arc of vision,” a characteristic that “relates to Pollock rather than Mondrian,

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mak[ing] the use of this word [relief] unsatisfactory.” However, if Coplans was reluctant to label the works “reliefs,” he did feel comfortable using the rhetoric of the specific object: “Novros very deliberately requires his painting neither to be read as sculpture nor as painting, but as something in between.”108 Coplans’s “something in between” clearly echoes the opening lines to Judd’s game-changing essay, and he used the artist’s logic about the significance of the painted edge to locate Novros closer to Judd’s camp than to Stella’s. Though he saw similarities between Novros’s and Stella’s approach to shape, Coplans ultimately concluded: “Stella does not consider his paintings as sculptural objects in the same way that Novros does. Stella’s paintings, for example, finish at the framing edge, whereas Novros extends his painting around the framing edge.”109 A letter to the editor by Reltnee Mroubou (one of Novros’s friends writing under pseudonym) in the following issue of Artforum vigorously disputed Coplans’s characterization of the Dwan show. (“Novros does not consider his paintings sculptural at all.”110) Nevertheless, the issue of objecthood would prove to be a persistent theme in the reception of the artist’s work, often to its detriment. These critics deemed Novros’s paintings to be conservative, in that they simulated work by object-makers such as Judd without relinquishing the trappings of painting: paint, canvas, stretcher bars. If Judd’s specific objects seized on the teleological implications of modernist criticism by abandoning two dimensions for three, then Novros’s work could be viewed as tepid, unwilling to fully articulate the consequences of its own presuppositions. Judd used this line of reasoning when discussing the work of his peers in a symposium held at New York University in November 1966 (the same month that Novros’s Dwan L.A. exhibition opened), entitled “Is Easel Painting Dead?”: “Both Stella and Poons have a certain kind of order that I like which, unlike painting itself, is radical and new. In other words, I may like the order, but feel sorry too that it’s in painting.”111 This belief in painting’s regressive status appeared in a number of critics’ responses to Novros. Even Lippard, one of painting’s staunchest advocates in these debates, commented that “his work might be more provocative if it were not on soft, textured canvas.”112 In response to Novros’s second show with Virginia Dwan, this time in her New York gallery, Pat Sloane wrote, “Novros builds stretchers and covers them with canvas and covers the canvas with paint to imitate hunks of metal; using hunks of metal would have been a better idea.”113 Barbara Rose characterized the work as “fill[ing] the gap between Stella and Judd” (of course, as Stella’s then wife, she had a vested interest in policing these boundaries).114 James R. Mellow offered the most considered rumination on this point in a review of both Novros and Mogensen: Painters now tend to avoid any brash or associative color, just as they tend to avoid any of those surface inflections—the personal exercise of brushwork— which would call attention to the individual unit and detract from the basic silhouettes of the units or from their arrangements. At this point, however, I begin to wonder: Why, then, use paint and canvas at all? Isn’t it a bit vestigial? Why not cut the forms from some solidly colored material—from one of the varieties of plastic, for example? Then another question arises. If the importance is one of units—and naturally of three-dimensional units—arranged in a certain order, is placement on the wall really necessary? Isn’t that, too, a bit of a hang-up on the traditional form of painting? Such arrangements could as well be made to stand or to lie on the

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David Novros floor; they could as well take on sculptural prerogatives. At this stage, work like Novros’ or Mogensen’s begins to seems somewhat retardataire.115

Novros would have likely responded to such criticism with ambivalence. On the one hand, he was committed to his identity as a painter and to an aesthetic experience only the wall could provide. Mellow’s suggestion that his practice more naturally lent itself to the floor was utterly anathema to his interests at this time. On the other hand, he would have agreed with these critics that canvas mounted on stretchers was not the ideal support for his work. He has recently stated that from the outset he had wished to make the Dwan works on aluminum honeycomb panels, but this option was simply unaffordable at the time. The aluminum surface would have required much less of the white vinyl lacquer that Novros used to hide the canvas’s texture, and it would have more brilliantly showcased the Murano’s chromatic shifts.116 In his work in the sixties, he frequently painted on Dacron, a synthetic material with no visible weave that is typically used in the fabrication of sails.117 With neither aluminum nor Dacron would a work’s color be intrinsic to the support, as Sloane and Mellow seemed to desire, but his interest in broadening the range of materials available to painting suggests his dissatisfaction with the medium’s historic conventions and arguably reflects the influence of Judd’s industrial surfaces.

The Fiberglass Paintings In 1967, Novros found a support he believed would allow for an even closer identification of painting and wall. He began painting on thin fiberglass panels that presented a minimal profile—to such an extent that, from a distance, their color almost appeared flush with the wall. He initially made the fiberglass himself at a facility in Long Island City before striking up a partnership with a manufacturer of dune buggy bodies he met in Los Angeles. Novros would send preparatory drawings to L.A., where the fabricator would produce the panels and ship them back to Novros to be painted.118 Two additional new developments occurred in Novros’s practice at this time. First, he settled on a perpendicular, L-shaped panel as his signature modular unit, abandoning the angular motifs that had figured prominently in his shows with Dwan and Park Place. Novros had experimented with this form since 2:16 of 1965, and by 1967, he had come to view it as an adaptable yet “expressive” form suited to a multitude of configurations. This module was an extension of his earlier deductive strategies, now with an increased emphasis on the units echoing the perimeter of the wall rather than the outlines of their interstices. Subjected to a variety of rotations and inversions, the perpendicular units could be nested to juxtapose bars of color, or they could be abutted to form a frieze-like sequence that incorporated open rectangles of wall space into the composition. As in the Dwan exhibition, Novros eschewed strict modularity in favor of units of varying lengths that created a rhythmic expansion and compression of negative space. In this sense, Novros remained concerned with traditional principles of composition, such as harmony and balance. Furthermore, he has described the right angle as being rooted in art historical tradition, seeing precedents in the earliest instances of post-and-lintel architecture and even in Paleolithic cave painting.119 Whereas many of his peers worked with rectilinear forms for their supposed neutrality, Novros was drawn to their referentiality.

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The second important development in Novros’s practice at this time was his turn to polychromy. While the Dwan paintings were never truly monochromatic due to the Murano, his work now displayed a much more varied use of color, at times staying within a single color family and at others creating bold chromatic juxtapositions, as in the green, blue, and orange of Untitled (Plate 8). He sprayed the panels with an acrylic lacquer, commonly used in auto body painting, to which he would at times add flatteners or Murano pigment, creating a variety of surface effects within a single work. For example, in Untitled, the leftmost panel appears bone in color with a matte finish from afar but acquires a metallic pearlescence on close viewing. The middle blue panel retains its matte finish regardless of the viewer’s position, while the gray panel it abuts shades to pink with the viewer’s lateral movement due to the Murano. The most striking Murano effects are found in the second panel in from the right, which ostensibly belongs to the same family of neutral tones as the other two upper panels but picks up shades of orange and green depending on the viewer’s position. For Harris Rosenstein, who wrote the most sustained and sympathetic account of the artist’s practice at this time, these changes in structure and color made his work’s claim on the wall all the more compelling: “With all that he has done with shape and color, the first thing to be said about Novros is that the wall is his perceptual space; he can open up on it and literally breathe that space into the work.”120 While the fiberglass paintings demonstrated new levels of complexity in Novros’s handling of such traditional painterly concerns as color and light, the issue of objecthood continued to be a dominant theme in the reception of his work. He had abandoned the deep edges that, for Coplans and others, had connoted a sculptural identity, yet, as Novros stated in a previously quoted remark, minimizing its depth made the work “intensely object-like.” For critics already accustomed to seeing fiberglass and other synthetic polymers being used by the period’s most advanced object-makers—such as Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Craig Kauffmann, and DeWain Valentine—Novros’s painted panels must have seemed like a new entry into an already recognizable field of sculptural production. Furthermore, the thinness of the fiberglass, coupled with the even atomization of the sprayed lacquer, created a strong identification of color and support, to such a degree that the color can seem intrinsic to the material, rather than being “on top” of it, to use Judd’s characterization of “ordinary painting.” A review by Cindy Nemser reflects the works’ seemingly fabricated qualities: “Novros’s shapes have the meticulous finish of machine-cut parts. His flat, lustrous surfaces echo, poignantly, the shiny magic of the latest product of General Motors.”121 Other critics continued to invoke the by now pervasive rhetoric of the specific object in reference to the fiberglass panels. Grace Glueck wrote that “Novros . . . produces flat multiple wall reliefs—sometimes in spectacular scale—that hover between painting and sculpture.”122 Kurt Von Meier, in an article titled “Painting to Sculpture” that elaborated on painting’s transition into the third dimension that James Mellow had anticipated earlier, identified Novros, along with Clark Murray, as “painters who have become sculptors,”123 and Robert Pincus-Witten described his works as “sculptures,” albeit ones with “pictorial concerns.”124 For these critics, the fiberglass’s conspicuous materiality—no matter how slight its depth—could never permit Novros’s desired identification with the wall.125 If the fiberglass works contributed to Novros’s reputation as a maker of objects, they nonetheless also established him as one of his generation’s premier colorists. Indeed,

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Novros was the rare artist in his New York cohort to demonstrate such a full embrace of color. While color played an important role in the work of such canonical Minimalists as Judd and Flavin, these artists did not venture into the kind of radical polychromy typical of Novros’s art of the late sixties until later in their careers. His achievements as a colorist earned him the most significant critical plaudits of his early career. More than one critic approvingly likened the fiberglass paintings to rainbows, with Grace Glueck calling his 1969 exhibition at Bykert Gallery “the most dazzling color experience in town.”126 Scott Burton declared, “The surface is more dazzling and the object more self-contained than ever” and rhapsodized about their “floral-like beauty.” Robert Pincus-Witten praised their “extraordinarily refined and peculiar” palette.127 Yet these same critics had difficulty reconciling the unbridled sensuality of Novros’s color with the panels’ loosely modular, repetitive structure, which Peter Plagens described as having “an austerity in the neighborhood of Carl Andre’s metal rugs.”128 For Plagens, the impersonality of these structures gave them a “conceptual flavor [that] . . . mitigates against painting, which carries overtones of sensuality and illusion.”129 Burton found his “inevitable lyric response” frustrated by the works’ “utter absence of emotive context.”130 Likewise, Pincus-Witten observed a “break between the aspirations of color and structure in Novros’s work.”131 By the late sixties, modular forms had become a clearly recognized trope of the minimal—a guarantor of the suppression of semiosis—hence the dissonance between the works’ structure and putatively expressive color experienced by these critics. Yet it should be emphasized once more that Novros never considered his perpendicular forms to resist signification. In their varying lengths, spatial dynamics, and chromatic relationships, he saw the orchestration of complex narratives. As he has stated in a recent interview: These forms all mean something to me. These relationships are this way because they are meant to signify my intentions as to what the personas are. They are like a family portrait. . . . These aren’t formalist, there is a drama that evolves, and I know who the players are and they are fixed in my mind.132 Where the critics expected silence, Novros spoke with a spatial and chromatic syntax uniquely his own.

A Specific Fresco If Novros did not necessarily agree with his critics that color and structure were at odds in his work, by 1968, he must have come to see his perpendicular panels as limiting in some capacity, for at this point he set his sights on working directly on the wall. A letter to his parents captures his motivations for this momentous shift: I have gotten a new idea in my head that is born out of some cock-eyed sense of environment past—after finishing a number of smaller commissioned paintings I want eventually to paint paintings on my walls. This is a solution to the “galleryartist” relation and might possibly lead to some direct wall commissions. The work is gradually going in that direction with the thinner units but the physicality of the panels still seems to interfere with many ideas I have about the nature of paintings I’d like to see. The purity of painting directly on the wall excites me in both a moral + aesthetic sense. Perhaps I’m getting senile + this is an attempt

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at returning to my childhood. I’ve always noticed that when I sprayed on a wall directly the color was profoundly suggestive.133 While this letter might suggest that Novros’s desire to paint true murals began at this time, he insists that this ambition had much earlier origins, dating back to his first shaped paintings, if not his paintings on the walls of his childhood home.134 However, the letter does appear to reflect a shift in his thinking that resulted in a more earnest commitment to creating bona fide murals. What goes unstated in these lines to his parents is that when it was written in December 1968, Novros was by no means alone in his interest in painting on walls. At this time, murals were, in fact, the talk of the New York art world. That September, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo, an exhibition of Italian frescoes that had been pried from their original locations for conservation in the wake of the 1966 flood of the Arno. While The Treasures of Tutankhamun of 1976 is today widely credited with inaugurating the age of the blockbuster exhibition, one could argue that The Great Age of Fresco rightfully holds this dubious distinction. A month after it opened, museum officials reported that the exhibition drew over 6,000 visitors per day, prompting them to extend gallery hours to accommodate the public’s unprecedented level of interest. Attendance had reached 180,000 visitors in just over the first half of its run135 and ultimately peaked at 377,171 in a span of less than two months, making it the most heavily attended exhibition in the museum’s history to date.136 The art press thrilled to the show, describing it as nothing short of a revelation. In the New York Times, John Canaday dubbed it the best exhibition of the decade, and James Mellow ecstatically called it “the kind of show one feels one ought to live in for a month.”137 Writing in Arts Magazine, Noel Frackman praised its achievement in making a notoriously esoteric art (“the least familiar of all media to us in America”) accessible to a wider public: Whoever has tried to view frescoes in Italian towns knows it can be a frustrating adventure. The churches are shut for the siesta or closed for reconstruction, the light is poor, religious services are in progress or one wanders around selfconsciously seeking some hidden refectory. How splendid now to have these works readily available for viewing at leisure.138 Containing over 70 works by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Castagno, Uccello, and others, many of them between 10 and 15 feet high, the exhibition revealed the tradition of Italian mural painting in its full monumentality. In addition to the wall-sized frescos and fresco fragments, it featured sinopie, preparatory drawings done on the base layer of rough plaster (the arriccio) before the application of the intonaco, or final layer of plaster on which the artist painted. The two layers were separated as part of the conservation process, revealing the sinopie for the first time since they were executed centuries ago. The exhibition thus not only made available a wealth of scholarly information, but it also made the process of buon fresco come alive for the viewer in an unprecedented fashion.139 The museum augmented this latter aspect of the show by staging demonstrations of fresco-making in the galleries, conducted by, as Grace Glueck reported, “mini-skirted girls from the museum’s Department of Education.”140 Novros acknowledged seeing The Great Age of Fresco when asked in recent conversation. He maintained that while he enjoyed the show, his interest in fresco

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significantly predated it, having stemmed from his European sojourn, during which he saw many of the most historically significant examples of the medium. Furthermore, he stated that seeing frescoes in a museum, dislodged from their original sites, only underscored the need to work with the medium in situ.141 That said, the fact that he sent his letter shortly after the exhibition closed makes it seem likely that it factored prominently in his thinking. Another artist for whom “The Great Age of Fresco” proved revelatory was Mel Bochner, who, in a recent essay, has credited it, along with the student graffiti in the May 1968 Paris riots and Andy Warhol’s “cow wallpaper” of 1966, as a key source of inspiration for his own wall-based practice: [These three events] began to suggest a new site, a new scale, a new sense of time—in short, the possibility of a new kind of experience. Wall-works bypass double supports. Marks drawn on the wall—here forward and in view; there only peripherally visible—spread along the wall. Simultaneously, in front of and behind you, fixed where they are by the wall’s mass, they become, perceptually, pure surface. The thickness of the wall has been rendered experientially negligible. These works cannot be “held”; they can only be seen.142 Although their practices are otherwise wholly dissimilar, Bochner’s appreciation of wall-based work resonates with Novros’s in suggestive ways: the environmental scale, the kinesthetic perceptual experience that unfolds in time, the material immediacy that circumvents “double supports.” To conclude his essay, Bochner suggests that the most radical implications of a wall-based practice were ontological: “It was a dream, perhaps unrealizable, that this work might somehow achieve an existential unity between reality and appearance”143—a formulation that echoes Novros’s previously quoted claim that in frescos, “illusion could be totally synonymous with physical reality.” If Novros’s and Bochner’s practices converged in their understanding of the wall’s potential, they diverged radically in what they elected to do with it, as even a passing familiarity with their careers would attest. Yet this divergence can be instructive as well, as both artists cite the example of Donald Judd as a key influence in their turn to wall-based work. For Bochner, painting on the wall refuted what he saw as the specific object’s solipsistic “withdrawal from the world”:144 “By collapsing the space between the artwork and the viewer, a wall painting negates the gap between lived time and pictorial time, permitting the work to engage larger philosophical, social, and political issues.”145 Wall work thus represented for Bochner an escape from Judd’s example, which he believed had grown oppressive in its formalist hermeticism. For Novros, on the other hand, working on the wall represented an extension of Judd’s own thinking that enabled a recuperation of painting for his literalist times. Judd must have viewed Novros’s aspirations for fresco in similar terms, prompting him to give the artist his first commission in the medium. Purchased in 1968, Judd’s residence and studio at 101 Spring Street was where he first implemented his concept of permanent installation. “I spent a great deal of time placing the art and a great deal designing the renovation in accordance,” he wrote. “Everything from the first was intended to be thoroughly considered and to be permanent.”146 Along with a sculpture by Dan Flavin, the fresco was one of only two works to be commissioned for the space, and it was the only one to permanently alter the material surface of the architecture. Given its unique status in the development of this cornerstone of Judd’s

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career, the fresco is all too often overlooked in the Judd literature, a fact Novros himself has lamented.148 It is a remarkable historical confluence that the two artists arrived at their interest in permanent installation independently from one another and at roughly the same time. For Judd, this concern was born out of his dissatisfaction with the treatment of his work by art institutions. Seeing his sculptures poorly displayed and damaged over the course of repeated installation and deinstallation sparked a desire to remove them from the art world’s networks of circulation in favor of a fixed location that would shelter them from the predations of commodity exchange. He quickly realized that this interest in permanence went hand-in-hand with an increased attention to the conditions of display. As he wrote in his mission statement for the Chinati Foundation, The purpose of the foundation is to preserve my work and that of others and to preserve this work in spaces I consider appropriate for it. This effort has been a concern second only to the invention of my work. And gradually the two concerns have joined and both tend toward architecture.149 Novros, on the other hand, arrived at fresco through issues more intrinsic to his own practice—a gradual, progressive honing of the “direct confrontation with the wall space vs. painting idea.” Painting frescos could be considered the logical fulfillment of the Juddian precepts that informed his early work, from the shaped canvases through the fiberglass panels. Yet fresco’s permanence also appealed to Novros on “moral” grounds, as stated in the previously quoted letter, offering “a solution to the ‘galleryartist’ relation.” Indeed, after receiving a string of mural commissions throughout the seventies, he would all but abandon the gallery system by the early years of the following decade. For both artists, then, permanence represented a means of resisting the commodification of the work of art. At a time when many of their conceptualist peers theorized strategies of resistance premised on “dematerialization,” Novros and Judd aspired to a radical form of material fixity that negated art’s exchange value.150 Novros articulated this ambition in a recent lecture at the Rothko Chapel: Today paintings are valued by their price and, more importantly, by their re-sale prices. The validation (or lack of validation) by the market, the commodification, has resulted in an extended family enthusiastically supporting the game; but there is another way for painting to enter the public consciousness, and this place [the chapel] is a good example of that alternative.151 Similarly, Judd maintained, My work and that of my contemporaries that I acquired was not made to be property. It’s simply art. I want the work I have to remain that way. It is not on the market, not for sale, not subject to the ignorance of the public, not open to perversion.152 Ironically, this refusal of art’s commodity status arguably made both artists more beholden to what Clement Greenberg famously termed “the umbilical cord of gold,” as they came to rely on a pre-market model of artistic patronage that dealt them both their share of frustrations.153 Judd underwent an arduous series of financial and legal

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tribulations with the Dia Foundation in the founding of Chinati154 and saw how easily his ambitions could be coopted in his dealings with Count Giuseppe Panza, whose unauthorized reconstruction of a site-specific work for a 1989 exhibition at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, prompted the artist to denounce the collector for “us[ing] permanence as bait.”155 Novros’s career as a muralist came to depend on wall space supplied by patrons who did not always share his commitment to permanence, including the Museum of Modern Art, which, to the artist’s chagrin, insisted that the fresco it commissioned for its Projects series in 1973 be temporary.156 For both artists, the freedom to let art be “simply art,” to use Judd’s phrase, was underwritten by individuals or institutions with significant resources and their own potentially competing interests. Furthermore, for both artists the commitment to permanence was predicated on a withdrawal from the spaces of art’s visibility: to the remote plains of Marfa for Judd; to the (often private) walls of patrons for Novros.157 While Judd’s renown obviously did not suffer from this withdrawal, the same cannot be said for Novros, whose status in current art historical writing belies his prominence in the late sixties and seventies.158 Indeed, given the degree to which many contemporaneous conceptual and site-specific practices that purportedly critiqued art’s institutionalization have been assimilated into the art market’s economies of display and exchange (via re-creation, diagrammatic or photographic documentation, etc.), Novros’s use of a medium as timeless as mural painting has proven to be a remarkably effective form of resistance.159 Moreover, it is worth contemplating how his dual absence from both the spaces of art’s display and its scholarly literature might be a symptom of art history’s dependence on art institutions and the market for generating its subjects of inquiry. However, in 1970, unencumbered by any future disillusionment, Novros and Judd must have viewed buon fresco, with its air of arch historicity, as a radical alternative to an increasingly hype-driven art market that churned through temporary exhibitions. The plan for the fresco was born out of conversations in Max’s Kansas City, where both artists socialized and had work displayed on the walls. As Novros has recounted, Judd admired his recent paintings and was aware of his interest in attempting a fresco. Sensing the parallels with his own nascent interest in permanent installation, Judd offered the younger artist his first commission, agreeing to provide the materials and labor, as well as a work of his own, in exchange.160 Novros threw himself headlong into the project, reading texts on medieval painting techniques, purchasing vast quantities of pigment, and executing numerous preparatory watercolors, followed by a full-scale cartoon that he transferred to the wet plaster using the traditional pouncing technique.161 Working alongside a plasterer, he completed the fresco in two days and found himself stunned with the results: “It was technically absolutely perfect. It was heartbreaking, it was so good.”162 If Novros was pleased with the fresco’s technical perfection after its completion, the ensuing decades were less kind to the work. Oil seepage from within the building’s walls left it badly stained, and restoration efforts in dry media only further compromised its surface integrity. Thankfully, as part of its recent renovation of 101 Spring Street, the Judd Foundation undertook a thorough restoration of the fresco in 2013, and it can once again be seen as the painter intended.163 Fresco’s undeniable unity of color and architecture allowed Novros to rely less on the right angle’s integration of negative wall space. His signature motif thus took on a diminished role in the mural, as he worked primarily with rectangles of varying sizes to produce a three-tiered composition that prompts a lateral reading from left to

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right. Formal and chromatic particularities then complicate this initial inclination. A sequence of three downward-facing right angles lead the eye on a descending, diagonal trajectory, while the familial relationships between individual blocks of color prompt a more holistic scanning, as one links the varying shades of blue, brown, burgundy, etc. Novros frequently painted lighter shades over darker ones, giving each field a slightly variegated facture and depth of color reminiscent of a Mark Rothko. Prominent passages of unpainted plaster in the rightmost third assert the material plane of the wall, denying the spatial readings that might arise from the push and pull of chromatic juxtaposition and creating the impression that the painting is somehow emerging from the substance of the wall. Novros painted the mural in the living room on the building’s second floor, which also housed its kitchen and dining room, on a wall perpendicular to a massive expanse of south-facing, double-pane windows that stretch nearly from floor to ceiling and bathe the work in an extraordinary light. The fresco’s height aligns with these windows, foregrounding its relationship to the natural light of the room. Slight changes of cloud cover or time of day produce surprisingly noticeable chromatic shifts, and when seen on a clear, sunny day, the reflections from passing cars produce coils of light that ripple across its surface, imparting an unexpected jolt of kineticism. The only other work of art on that floor is an early red Ad Reinhardt, with which the mural evinces a degree of kinship. In its tiered structure, Novros’s fresco is reminiscent of Giotto’s narrative bands in the Scrovegni chapel. However, in the place of biblical narrative, one encounters a wholly non-figurative configuration of color and form—a renewal of abstract painting under the aesthetic regime of material specificity. If the fresco announced the convergence of Judd’s and Novros’s artistic pursuits, it also revealed emerging differences. Indeed, one could argue that the fresco signaled Novros’s exit from the Minimalist field. It is an unapologetically relational painting, expressing the artist’s sophisticated intuition for polychromatic balance. Part-to-part calibrations of size, shape, hue, and tonality contribute to a carefully orchestrated sense of equilibrium. A far cry from a “one thing after another” form of order, the fresco revealed Novros’s allegiances to earlier, historical modes of abstract composition, as well as the influence of his friendships and artistic exchanges with Paul Mogensen and Brice Marden, two painters who remain important touchstones for him to this day. Novros continued to work in this vein into the seventies, both in his commissioned frescos and in the multi-canvas works that he showed in his remaining gallery exhibitions. Perhaps it is for this reason that Judd later cooled to Novros’s work and did not commission a subsequent fresco for Marfa.165 By that point, of course, Novros had no shortage of potential patrons, as he embarked on a series of frescoes and other site-specific projects in locations such as the Penzoil corporate headquarters (1975, Houston, TX, since relocated to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts), University of Texas Health Science Center (1977, Dallas, TX) (fig. 3.16), Newark Penn Station (1984, NJ), and others.166 Nonetheless, their divergence after 1970 does not diminish the fresco’s significance to Judd and his project at 101 Spring Street. He was, by all accounts, very pleased with the work and sought out Novros for periodic conservation treatments to address its staining. Furthermore, Novros was by no means the only artist to ally himself with and subsequently deviate from Judd’s example. Judd was one of the dominant intellectual poles for artists of this generation, and Minimalism’s history was, to a significant degree, shaped by the vectors assumed by artists such as Stella, Flavin, Bochner, and others in response to its gravitational pull. Novros’s trajectory from the shaped

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Figure 3.16 David Novros, Untitled, 1977, fresco, Gooch Auditorium, University of Texas Health Science Center, Dallas, TX. © 2018 David Novros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

canvases, through the fiberglass panels, to the Spring Street fresco represents one such story—one with profound implications for painting’s status in the larger Minimalist field, as it speaks to the possibility of a productive, rather than agonistic, relationship between the medium and the specific object. As Novros’s work attests, painting that absorbed the challenges of Judd’s paradigm was fundamentally different from earlier modes of abstraction—from its materiality, to its phenomenology, to its economy of commission and display.

Notes 1. David Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. 2. Ibid. 3. David Novros, “Oral History Interview with David Novros, 2008 Oct. 22–27,” interview by Michael Brennan, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2008, www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-david-novros-15634. 4. David Novros, “Interview with David Novros,” interview by Thomas Butter, White Hot Magazine (August 2009), http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/with-david-novrospart-1/1927.

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5. Mel Bochner has commented on the importance of Judd’s criticism to artists of this generation: “Judd opened up art writing, showing that it didn’t deserve its bad name as a literary form and that it could establish the grounds for a public discourse among artists.” Also, “In 1966, Judd was a topic of endless conversations among the artists I knew . . . His writing and his sculpture influenced us all.” Mel Bochner, untitled essay, in The Writings of Donald Judd: A Symposium Hosted by the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, May 3–4, 2008 (Marfa: The Chinati Foundation/La Fundacìon Chinati, 2009), 22–3. 6. James Meyer, Minimalism (London: Phaidon, 2000),, 39. The fact that this characterization of Judd’s position appears in a text written for a general audience demonstrates the degree to which it has become accepted as common art historical knowledge. 7. For example, when he writes, “When all was said and done, Poons was irremediably compositional, [Judd] complained in 1968, and not only because (sin of sins!) Poons continued to paint.” This “sin of sins” again indicates the doctrinaire attitude toward painting that Meyer ascribes to Judd. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 169. 8. Quoted in Marianne Stockebrand, “A Message from the Director,” La Fundaciòn Chinati/ The Chinati Foundation 4 (1999): 1. 9. Also relevant in this regard is an anecdote told by John Wesley: “I said to [Judd] ‘So painting’s dead is it?’ He said, ‘Well, I meant easel painting’.” Rackstraw Downes, et al., “Painting: A Roundtable Discussion,” La Fundaciòn Chinati/The Chinati Foundation 4 (1999): 1. 10. For one such argument, see Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 35–68. 11. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 181. 12. Rosalind Krauss, et al., “The Reception of the Sixties,” October 69 (Summer 1994): 9–10. David Raskin’s consideration of Krauss and Judd is valuable on this point, particularly his discussion of the difference between “illusion” and “illusionism.” David Raskin, “The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd,” Art Journal 65, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 9–11. Richard Shiff also takes up this distinction in “Donald Judd, Safe from Birds,” in Donald Judd, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 41–2. 13. On the subject of Novros’s art historical merits, it should be noted that the relative lack of scholarly literature on the artist belies his prominence in the sixties. In addition to participating in prominent group exhibitions, like Systemic Painting and A Romantic Minimalism, Novros had five solo exhibitions in the decade (more than either Mangold or Baer) in some of New York’s most prominent galleries, including Park Place, Dwan, and Bykert. 14. Adrian Kohn, “Judd on Phenomena,” Rutgers Art Review 23 (2007): 81. 15. Judd, “In the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 13. 16. Judd, “Dorothy Eisner,” in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 33. 17. One finds a similar attitude expressed in Judd’s review of Robert Richenburg, which he dismisses as “more ‘unique collections’ than inventions.” Judd, “Robert Richenburg,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 50. Even more damning is his evisceration of Robert Goodnough, who, Judd writes, “probably believes that his stylistic licentiousness is freedom. Actually it is subservience.” Judd, “Robert Goodnough,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 54. 18. Judd, “Lee Bontecou,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 65. 19. Ibid. 20. Judd most clearly articulated this point in his 1963 review of Noland, where he writes, “[Painting] lacks the specificity and power of actual materials, actual color and actual space.” Judd, “Kenneth Noland,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 92. However, Judd’s stance was not as categorical as is often perceived. For example, later that year, he stated that Pollock’s painting exceeded Chamberlain’s sculpture in its polarity of aspects. Judd, “Chamberlain: Another View,” reprinted in Complete Writings: 1959–75, 108. 21. Judd, “Jack Youngerman,” reprinted in Complete Writings 1959–1975, 11. 22. “[T]he structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.” Judd, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” 150. 23. Judd, “Milton Resnick,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 13. 24. Judd, “Toward a Newer Abstraction,” reprinted in Complete Writings 1959–1975, 91. This “almost no space” might be a hedge on Judd’s part, as he spoke of Stella’s (presumably

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

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David Novros total) “absence of illusionistic space” in his review of the artist’s 1962 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery. Judd, “Frank Stella,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 57. Judd, “Alfred Jensen,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 86. Ibid. Mel Bochner has also commented on the significance of this passage in Judd’s corpus. Bochner, untitled essay, 18. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 124–6. Judd, “Frank Stella,” 58. Judd, “Local History,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 153. Roberta Smith, untitled essay, in The Writings of Donald Judd: A Chinati Foundation Symposium, 68–9. See Judd’s discussion of both artists in “Black White and Gray,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 117–18. Roberta Smith has commented that the version of “Specific Objects” published in the Collected Writings is stylistically different from his regular reviews which “kind of start in a certain way and end in a certain way—usually with a bang at both ends.” Smith, 67. The original version, then, should be considered more true to Judd’s rhetorical style. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 82. Revised and reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975, 183–4. The essay did contain a reproduction of Judd’s Untitled (1963), though, as Judd states in an endnote in the Collected Writings, this was included by the Arts Yearbook editor without his involvement. Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 189. Judd, “The Shaped Canvas,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 161. Judd, “Gene Davis,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 99. Judd, “New York Letter,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 172. “The more closely color could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations. The effect conveys a sense not only of color as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of color as a thing that opens and expands the picture plane.” Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” 97. Novros, “Oral History Interview with David Novros.” Novros’s comments on Judd’s attitude towards the SoHo fresco confirm the latter’s admiration for the medium. When Novros had to restore it with dry pigment due to oil seeping into its surface from behind the wall, Judd lamented the fact that the true fresco surface had to be compromised. Presumably, the addition of dry media would have had the quality of one material being “on top of” another that he found distasteful in traditional painting. David Novros, interviewed by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, December 2, 1997, Artist Documentation Program Video Interview Transcript, Menil Collection, Houston, 24. Novros, “Oral History Interview with David Novros.” Lester and Esther Novros met while Esther was enrolled in the New Jersey art school where Lester taught. His studies of motion led him to abandon painting for film, and in 1936, they relocated to Los Angeles where he worked as a Disney animator, contributing to films such as Snow White and Fantasia. Lester would later take a position as a film professor at the University of Southern California and found his own production company, Graphic Films, with partner George Casey. Much respected as both an academic and film maker, he counted future luminaries such as George Lucas among his students and created special effects for such important titles as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ibid. Novros, “Interview with David Novros,” White Hot Magazine. Ibid. Novros also expounded on this idea in his lecture “Painting and Patronage,” delivered on February 12, 2011 at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX, also published as the essay, “Painted Places and Patronage,” The Brooklyn Rail (June 2011). https://brooklynrail. org/2011/06/art/painted-places-and-patronage. “I believe that Rothko (and his contemporaries, Pollock, Newman, Still, and Kline) would have been muralists in a better time. They would have been able to make painting in a context that would have been consistent with their architectural and existential ambitions.” “I knew a lot of the people in the LA art scene by face before I left and I kind of resented them. I didn’t like the Ferus scene. It kind of reminded me of fraternities. Just the kind of

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thing I disliked socially, so I kind of turned my nose at it.” Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. Novros, “Oral History Interview with David Novros.” David Novros, “In Conversation: David Novros with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail (June 2011). https://brooklynrail.org/2008/06/art/chuck-close-with-phong-bui-june-08 David Novros, “Skowhegan Lecture,” Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, 1978, audio recording. Ibid. Ibid. Novros would remain in this “control group” for a total of eight years before being formally discharged. There is some confusion as to where Novros saw the pavilion. He maintains that he saw it while visiting Los Angeles, but the only American exhibition of it on record occurred at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It is possible that he saw selected works from the pavilion at the Pasadena Art Museum, of which Hopps was the director. For a detailed discussion of how Cold War politics inflected the pavilion’s reception both in the United States and abroad, see Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 38–44. Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. Novros, in discussion with the author, July 25, 2012. An important early influence on this student work was James Jarvaise, a painter of abstract landscapes reminiscent of the work of Richard Diebenkorn, who was on the faculty of USC. Jarvaise showed in Dorothy Miller’s famed “16 Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art, which also featured the debut of Stella’s Black Paintings. As he told Phong Bui, “I wanted to paint on the wall, but I didn’t have any commissions, so I compensated with the modular work.” Novros, “In Conversation: David Novros with Phong Bui.” He has confirmed this account in his conversations with the author, “When I first moved here, I began making shaped multiple piece canvases because I wanted to go to the wall but couldn’t do it. I had to invent a way of doing it so I was making these pieces, and I was spraying them.” Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. Novros, “Interview with David Novros,” White Hot Magazine. Interestingly, Novros does not cite the Mexican muralists’ practice of making portable murals in fresco for exhibition purposes. Examples of this work would have been readily available to him at the Museum of Modern Art, which had José Clemente Orozco’s Dive Bomber and Tank (1940) and Diego Rivera’s Agrarian Leader Zapata (1931) in its collection. For an account of this tradition’s influence on an earlier generation of New York artists, particularly Jackson Pollock, see Robert Storr, “A Piece of the Action,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 33–68. David Novros, letter to Lester and Esther Novros, dated April 2, David Novros papers, 1963–2008, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Most of the Novros correspondences are not dated with a year. This letter can be conclusively dated to 1966 because it contains a sketch of 6:57 of that year. It should be noted that there is little consistency to the titling of Novros’s works from the sixties. He considers all of these paintings to be untitled, but to distinguish them from one another for the purposes of exhibitions and sales, he settled on a two-number nomenclature, in which the first refers to the number of panels in a work and the second the total number of exposed sides. Consequently, many paintings from this period are untitled, while others have the numerical designation—a fact that relates solely to the exigencies of their sale and display. David Bourdon, “A Terminal Artist,” Village Voice, February 10, 1966. For the authoritative history of Park Place, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York, exh. cat. (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, 2008). Liza Kirwin provides a valuable historical sketch of the group’s trajectory in “Art and Space: Park Place and the Beginning of the Paula Cooper Gallery,” Archives of American Art Journal 46, nos. 1/2 (2006): 36–40. The exhibition Inventing Downtown also prominently featured Park Place artists. Melissa Rachleff, et al., Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (New York: Grey Art Gallery, 2017). For contemporaneous accounts of the gallery’s activities, see David

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David Novros Bourdon, “E=MC2 à Go-Go,” Art News 64 (January 1966): 22–5, 57–9 and Ed Ruda, “Park Place 1963–1967: Some Informal Notes in Retrospect,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 2 (November 1967): 30–3. Ed Ruda, “Interview of Ed Ruda,” by Michael Oren, March 11, 1988, Michael Oren interviews with artists, transcripts 1979–91, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Also quoted in Kirwin, 36–7. Cooper would continue to demonstrate her allegiance to the Park Place artists decades later, as her eponymous gallery currently represents Novros, di Suvero, and Grosvenor. Novros, in discussion with the author August 10, 2009. Quoted in Henderson, 18. For an explanation of how specific Park Place artists incorporated these concepts into their practices, see Henderson, 14–17. Novros has mentioned Dean Fleming as being particularly outspoken in this regard. Novros, in discussion with the author August 10, 2009. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 21. David Bourdon, “Park Place: New Ideas,” Village Voice, November 25, 1965, 11. Corinne Robins, “Four Directions at Park Place,” Arts Magazine 40 (June 1966): 21. Lucy R. Lippard, “Perverse Perspectives,” Art International 11, no. 3 (March 1967): 30. Robins, 20. Novros discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. David Novros, undated letter to Paula Cooper, Park Place Gallery Art Research Records and the Paula Cooper Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Ruda, “Park Place 1963–1967,” 32. Robins, 22. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 183. Melissa Ragain has recently argued against this pictorialist understanding of di Suvero, elucidating the “politics of spatial occupation” advanced by his many sculptures that invited viewer participation. I would suggest that di Suvero and Novros’s Park Place works demonstrate that the pictorial and the embodied need not be mutually exclusive, making their pairing all the more meaningful. Melissa Ragain, “Kinetics of Liberation in Mark di Suvero’s Play Sculpture,” American Art 31, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 26–51. Quoted in Henderson, 37. Bourdon, “E=MC2 à Go-Go,” 59. Lucy R. Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International 10, no. 1 (January 1966): 91. Robins, 23. Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. Reinhardt had solo exhibitions in Dwan’s L.A. gallery in both 1962 and ’63. Novros’s senior year at USC spanned those two years, so it is difficult to be certain of which exhibition he saw. The exhibition included one earlier work (now destroyed) that hung in a separate room in the gallery. For the most complete technical history of these paintings, see Novros, interview with Mancusi-Ungaro. David Novros, unpublished lecture at “The Object in Transition, Session 3: David Novros, 6:30 and VI: XXXII” at the Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, January 26, 2008, www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/videos/object_in_transition_day2. html#2. Novros, “Interview with David Novros,” White Hot Magazine. Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. The lone instance was a review by Peter Plagens (a college classmate of the artist’s who was thus aware of his Californian extraction), which described his work as a synthesis of West Coast “finish fetish” and the “tough-minded,” “there it is; that’s it” spirit of New York Minimalism. Peter Plagens, “Los Angeles: David Novros, Mizuno Gallery,” Artforum 8, no. 5 (January 1970): 74. David Bourdon also saw Novros’s Californian origins as pertinent in his review of the first Park Place exhibition, writing that he could “only compare [the paintings’ metallic effects] to the high class finish of automotive upholstery or one of the opulent Du Pont synthetics. Novros comes from Los Angeles where everything man-made, not only the automobiles, has this kind of surface.” Bourdon, “A Terminal Artist.” For a discussion of how coastal stereotypes impacted the reception of California

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Minimalist artists, see James Meyer, “Another Minimalism,” in A Minimal Future: Art as Object 1958–1968, ed. Ann Goldstein and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004): 33–50. David Novros interviewed by Elizabeth Lunning, et al., September 12, 2005, Artist Documentation Program, Video Interview Transcript (Houston: Menil Collection), 4. Novros, interview with Mancusi-Ungaro, 5. Ibid., 7. Novros has reported that the completed paintings had upwards of 20 coats of paint. Ibid., 8. Novros, interview with Lunning, 9. In her Park Place article, Corinne Robins noted that Novros aspired for a “‘neutral’ painting in which the relationship of wall and canvas is inevitable.” Robins, 23. Similarly, David Bourdon observed, “While most paintings simply mar an otherwise immaculate bare wall, Novros’s multi-canvases incorporate the wall into the painting. Bourdon, “A Terminal Artist.” Fried, “Three American Painters,” 240. Ibid., 256. Fried, in fact, closes this essay by arguing that modernist painting—and by extension, deductive structuring—insulates the work of art from its environment: “It is as though there isn’t the room any more that would be needed for modernist painting to be pure, to immure itself, even relatively, from its environment.” Ibid., 260. For Judd’s description of Stella’s metallic paints’ literal materiality, see Judd, “Frank Stella,” reprinted in Complete Writings, 1959–75, 57. David Novros, letter to his family, dated November 12, David Novros papers 1963–2008. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” reprinted in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 123–4. Ibid., 141. This critique admittedly does not do justice to the full complexity of Merleau-Ponty’s essay and arguably would be more fairly leveled at the “perceptual monism” of his earlier writing on painting in his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt.” For a more complete exegesis of “Eye and Mind,” see Galen A. Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 35–55. For more on “perceptual monism,” see Galen A. Johnson, “Phenomenology and Painting: ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’” in Ibid., 27. Novros was not the only painter to lodge this complaint about the essay. In a 1962 letter, René Magritte criticized it for its failure to address the “mystery” of art, writing, “The only kind of painting Merleau-Ponty deals with is a variety of serious but futile divertissement, of value only to well-intentioned humbugs.” René Magritte, “Letter to Alphonse de Waelhens,” reprinted in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 336. Annette Michelson, Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969), 43–5. John Coplans, “David Novros,” Artforum 5, no. 5 (January 1967): 27. Henry J. Seldis, “David Novros Artistry Impresses,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1966. Ibid. Novros, interview with Mancusi-Ungaro, 8. Ibid., 14–15. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 92. Judd, “Frank Stella,” reprinted in Complete Writings: 1959–75, 58. Coplans’s review contained a number of errors, the most glaring of which was that he thought the white paintings in the show were made over the course of several years, rather than being made as an ensemble in response to the site. This and other misperceptions were addressed by a letter to the editor by Reltnee Mroubou in “Letters,” Artforum 5, no. 8 (April 1967): 7. Coplans, “David Novros,” 27. Ibid. Mroubou, 7. Novros does not wish to disclose Mroubou’s true identity. “Is Easel Painting Dead,” unpaginated transcript, November 10, 1966, panelists: Walter Darby Bannard, Donald Judd, Larry Poons, and Robert Rauschenberg, with Barbara Rose as moderator, Barbara Rose papers, 1962-circa 1969, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

130 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125.

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David Novros Lucy R. Lippard, “Rejective Art,” Art International 10, no. 8 (October 1966): 36. Pat Sloane, “In the Galleries: David Novros,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 7 (May 1967): 57 Barbara Rose, “New York: Group Show, Bykert,” Artforum 6, no. 3 (November 1967): 59. James R. Mellow, “New York,” Art International 11, no. 6 (Summer 1967): 52. Novros, interview with Mancusi-Ungaro, 104–5. See also, Novros interview with Lunning, 21. Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. Ibid. Ibid. See also Novros, Skowhegan lecture. Harris Rosenstein, “Total and Complex,” ARTnews 66, no. 3 (May 1967): 54. Cindy Nemser, “In the Galleries: David Novros,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 7 (May 1968): 65. Harris Rosenstein’s article of the prior year cautioned against just such a misreading, insisting that although the modular use of the right angle might remind one of “a stamping or machine part,” if his work is “to be consistent with itself, it has to be purely formal.” Rosenstein, 54. Grace Glueck, “Like a Beginning: New York Gallery Notes,” Art in America 57, no. 3 (May–June 1969): 117. Kurt Von Meier, “Painting to Sculpture: One Tradition in a Radical Approach to the History of Twentieth-Century Art,” Art International 12, no. 3 (March 1968): 38. Robert Pincus-Witten, “New York: David Novros, Bykert Gallery,” Artforum 7, no. 10 (Summer 1969): 62–3. An important exception on this point was Emily Wasserman, who, in an article that appears to have been written with some knowledge of the artist’s intentions, wrote: “The thin dimension of the fiberglass (one inch thick) and the lightness implied by iridescence also cancels out the sense of sculptural relief.” Emily Wasserman, “Richard van Buren, David Novros, Charles Ross: Three Californians in New York,” Artforum 6, no. 10 (Summer 1968): 36. Grace Glueck, “Danger on Fifty-Seventh Street,” New York Times, April 13, 1969. Glueck writes, “With his current concentration on color and surface, no one can accuse Novros of inventiveness as a form-maker. But to carp at that would be as cavalier as knocking a rainbow for its consistent arc-ness.” Scott Burton made a similar comparison, calling an earlier series of fiberglass works “20th century rainbows.” Scott Burton, “Reviews and Previews: David Novros,” ARTnews 67, no. 3 (May 1968): 56. Burton, 56. Plagens, “Los Angeles: David Novros, Mizuno Gallery,” 75. Ibid. Burton, 56. Pincus-Witten, “New York: David Novros, Bykert Gallery,” 63. Saul Ostrow, “David Novros Boat House,” ICA Art Documents: Now, May, 2005, accessed online via Artnet.com, www.artnet.com/usernet/awc/awc_historyview_details. asp?aid=425933473&awc_id=65837&info_type_id=7. David Novros letter to his family, dated December 5. David Novros papers. This letter can be dated to 1968 with certainty due to two contextual clues. First, the letter refers to the purchase of a painting by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller for a “government complex called the Albany Mall.” The work in question, Untitled of 1968, was purchased for the Empire Plaza Collection. See Dennis R. Anderson, ed., The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection and Plaza Memorials (Albany: New York State Office of General Services and Rizzoli International, 2002), 148–9. Second, he mentions seeing an exhibition of Persian Miniatures at the J.P. Morgan Library, writing that it was “The best I’ve ever seen and the color is ringing in my head and suggests a lot of things.” The exhibition in question would have been The Classical Style in Islamic Painting organized by Ernst Grube for the Morgan in 1968. I am indebted to William Voelkle of the Morgan for this information. When asked about this letter, Novros explained that he did not discuss his desire to paint murals with his parents earlier because they had been assisting him financially. Thus, his correspondences stressed his gallery successes rather than his fiscally dubious ambition to paint murals. Novros, in discussion with the author, February 26, 2013.

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135. Jurgen Schulz and Anne Markham Schulz, “The Great Age of Fresco in New York,” The Burlington Magazine 111, no. 790 (January 1969): 51. 136. Grace Glueck, “The Total Involvement of Thomas Hoving,” New York Times Magazine, December 8, 1968, 105. 137. John Canaday, “A Few Worsts, Bests, and Mosts,” New York Times, December 28, 1969; James R. Mellow, “New York Letter,” Art International 12, no. 10 (December 1968): 64. 138. Noel Frackman, “Rare Italian Frescoes,” Arts Magazine 43, no. 1 (September/October 1968): 52. 139. Millard Meiss and Ugo Proacci, The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1968). 140. Glueck, “The Total Involvement of Thomas Hoving,” 105. 141. Novros, in discussion with the author, July 25, 2012. 142. Mel Bochner, “Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 138. 143. Ibid., 140. 144. Ibid., 135. 145. Ibid., 140. 146. Quoted on Judd Foundation website, www.juddfoundation.org/new_york.htm. 147. The recent monograph about Judd’s concept of permanent installation, Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, makes only a passing reference to the fresco in its discussion of the SoHo building. Marianne Stockebrand, “The Journey to Marfa and the Pathway to Chinati,” in Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, ed. Marianne Stockebrand (Marfa: The Chinati Foundation/La Fundacón Chinati; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 18. 148. Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. 149. Donald Judd, “In Defense of My Work,” in Complete Writings, 1975–1986 (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1987), 9. 150. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, repr. ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997). 151. Novros, “Painting and Patronage.” 152. Judd, “In Defense of My Work,” 9. 153. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 11. 154. For an account of Dia’s role in Judd’s Marfa project, see Stockebrand, “The Journey to Marfa,” 30–6. 155. Donald Judd, “Una stanza per Panza, part II,” Kunst Intern 5 (July 1990): 5. For a history of the Marfa project, see Stockebrand, Chinati, 25–30. For an account of Judd’s difficulties with Panza, see James Meyer, “The Minimal Unconscious,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 141–76 and Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 1–3 and 36–42. For Judd’s complete response to the Panza affair, see Judd, “Una stanza per Panza, parts I-IV,” Kunst Intern 4–7 (May–November 1990). 156. For Novros’s account of the MoMA exhibition, see Novros, “Oral History Interview with David Novros.” This was not the only Novros fresco to face destruction. In 1997 Paul Winkler intervened to relocate his mural at the Penzoil building in Houston to the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. His frescos in the courtyard of the David W. Dyer Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Miami ran afoul of historic preservationists at the General Services Administration (which originally commissioned the work in 1984) but was ultimately spared demolition. See Mireya Navarro, “Off the Wall: Concrete Troubles Imperil Abstract Mural,” The New York Times, April 25, 2000. 157. It should be noted that Novros did not abandon the gallery system tout court with the realization of his first mural. He showed in galleries regularly throughout the seventies and less frequently in the eighties. While most of his energies have gone into site-specific projects, he has continued to produce salable objects, such as a series of works on copper that he displayed at Earl McGrath Gallery, New York in 1999. He has recently begun exhibiting with Paula Cooper Gallery. 158. A 2014 survey exhibition organized by the Museum Wiesbaden and Museum Kurhaus Kleve went some ways towards mitigating this scholarly neglect. Matthew L. Levy, et al.,

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161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166.

David Novros David Novros, exh. cat. (Wiesbaden: Museum Wiesbaden; Kleve: Museum Kurhaus Kleve; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2014). As Miwon Kwon has observed, “The ‘unhinging’ of site-specific art works first realized in the sixties and seventies is a separation engendered not by aesthetic imperatives but by pressures of the museum culture and the art market. Photographic documentation and other materials associated with site-specific art (preliminary sketches and drawings, field notes, instructions on installation procedures, etc.) have long been standard fare of museum exhibitions and a staple of the art market. In the recent past, however, as the cultural and market values of works from the sixties and seventies have risen, many of the early precedents in site-specific art, once deemed so difficult to collect and impossible to reproduce, have appeared in several high-profile exhibitions.” Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 96–7. Judd ultimately did not come through with the promised work, though Novros expresses no regrets about the project. Novros, “Oral History Interview with David Novros.” For additional published comments from Novros about the Judd commission, see Novros, interview with Mancusi-Ungaro, 22–5. Particularly useful to the artist was Daniel V. Thompson, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting (New York: Dover Publications, 1956). Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. Novros, interview with Mancusi-Ungaro, 23. For a technical account of the restoration process, see Mette Carlsen, “Conservation News,” Judd Foundation, December 5, 2013, http://juddfoundation.org/conservation-news. The diminished use of his signature motif at this time paralleled developments in his works on canvas, which also began to use rectangular panels in tandem with right angles. Novros, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2009. For an overview of his site-specific projects, see Matthew L. Levy, “David Novros’s Painted Places,” in David Novros, exh. cat. (Wiesbaden: Museum Wiesbaden; Kleve: Museum Kurhaus Kleve; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2014), 54–7. The artist’s Artnet homepage contains a complete record of these projects: www.artnet.com/awc/david-novros. html. His most recently completed frescoes are in private boat house of his design in Middleburg, NY, created in 2003. In 2017, he gifted the monumental multi-canvas Salida, to the Museum Wiesbaden, where it is permanently installed in a gallery for which it was conceived. In recent years, he has also been working on a large series of oil paintings that he envisions as being intended for a hypothetical architectural structure.

4

Jo Baer Painting Reframed

Baer’s Minimalism If Minimalism was a movement defined as much by polemic as by art, as the title of Meyer’s book suggests, then Jo Baer was its painter par excellence. Though she had comparatively few New York solo exhibitions in the sixties (two to Mangold’s four and Novros’s five), her work was more frequently shown alongside that of Minimalism’s most prominent sculptors, appearing in some of the movement’s formative group shows, including the Dan Flavin–curated Eleven Artists at Kaymar Gallery (1964), the opening exhibition of Dan Graham’s Daniels Gallery (1964), Mel Bochner’s exhibition-cum-proto-Conceptual compendium, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art at the School of Visual Arts (1966), Ten at Dwan Gallery (1967), and Bochner’s Art in Series at Finch College (1967). This list indicates that throughout the crucial years of Minimalism’s development, from its heterogeneous origins through its high moment of simultaneous canonization and critical entrenchment, Baer’s work—at least in the eyes of certain key observers—engaged with the movement’s most vital issues.1 And Baer was never one to shy away from polemic. While her best-known piece of writing remains her letter to the editor in the September 1967 issue of Artforum, in which she vigorously rebutted Judd’s and Morris’s critiques of painting, the 2010 publication of Baer’s collected writings revealed her to have been a frequent and spirited contributor to Minimalism’s dialogues and disputes. Baer wrote for a variety of purposes and with a fiercely independent voice (she made a point of not submitting her Artforum piece as an article because she did not wish to be paid for it).2 Her corpus contains acerbic correspondences that sever relationships (e.g., a letter to dealers Marilyn Fischbach and Donald Droll shortly after her first solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery and another to Jim Monte in 1972, withdrawing from a promised solo exhibition at the Whitney after he reduced its allotted gallery space); meditations on topics such as seriality, Fried’s aesthetics, and art’s relationship to politics and gender; and quasi-scientific tracts on optics and perception. Most pertinent to Baer’s status within Minimalism is a previously unpublished collection of exchanges with Andre, Smithson, LeWitt, Graham, Bochner, and Judd from 1966–67 that Baer had solicited for an unrealized publication project that would reflect their “new movement” in a more faithful manner than had been achieved by recent efforts in the art press, which she had deemed unsatisfactory.3 As will be discussed later, these “Dialogues” reflected Minimalism’s true heterogeneity more than its cohesion as a movement—though perhaps this was Baer’s

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intention, given her distaste for the critical elisions subtended by rubrics such as “ABC Art” and “Primary Structures.” In her own comments, Baer has spoken of Minimalism with ambivalence. On the one hand, she freely identifies her work from 1960–75 as her “Minimalist” period.4 Perhaps, like Mangold, she finds the term valuable as a means of situating her work in an artistic milieu most often thought to be primarily sculptural in character. More practically, the term also serves as a shorthand that sets her abstract period apart from the “radical figuration” she has pursued in the years since leaving New York for Europe. On the other hand, in her preface to the “Dialogues,” she wrote the period’s most sustained denunciation of the various critical labels then being circulated to describe the new abstraction, with “Minimal Art” deemed the worst offender “since at first it looks plausible.”5 Locating the term’s origins in Wollheim’s 1965 essay— which she rightly notes “did not speak of the artists now-so-named (our ‘minimalists’) at all”—she allows that, of the now-canonical Minimalists, only Morris’s “no color, anonymous gray” evinced the “intentionally low art content” Wollheim described. Furthermore, the “redundancies, proliferations and prolixities” found in the work of artists like LeWitt and Smithson (and indeed herself) resisted being characterized as in any way “minimal.”6 In her estimation, other then-popular labels also failed the art: “ABC Art” wrongheadedly connoted simplicity or a preoccupation with origins; “Primary Structures” ultimately “doesn’t mean anything” as it suffered a “tautological flaw which renders it true of anything and everything”; “Systemic Art,” which presumably referred to Alloway’s Guggenheim exhibition, suggested a “planned, modular system,” which only applied to some of the artists in her cohort; and other adjectives often bandied about by critics, such as “reductive,” “cool,” and “rejective,” implied an asceticism, which she humorously noted, “does not exist in the art, much less in the artists.”7 Though Baer judged all these terms deficient (“[They are] simply a labeling convenience for critics and curators. They are specious names and not suitable for extended use.”), the group of artists she recruited for the “Dialogues” does conform with present-day rosters of Minimalism’s key contributors.8 Though her criteria for inclusion were rather amorphous—factors included but were not limited to “friendship,” “some shared esthetic characteristics,” “a history of mutual shows,” the artists’ “published authorship,” and, most importantly, their status as “the most radical, inventive artists working today”—she was adamant that her work stood, to use her phrase, “in colloquy” with theirs.9 Moreover, Baer’s paintings looked Minimalist (Plate 9), perhaps to an even greater degree than those of Mangold and Novros. Avoiding their experiments with shape, she hewed to the rectangular conventions of easel painting, presenting viewers with what, to some eyes, appeared to be shockingly barren vistas. Such was the reaction she received when she unveiled the Koreans (1962–63, fig. 4.1), the series that contained the germ of what would become her signature format—an undifferentiated white plane, surrounded by a thin band of color, which in turn was framed by a thicker black band. The dealer Richard Bellamy, while supportive of the work, named the series on the regrettably Eurocentric basis that they “were unknown paintings, and no one knew about Korean art either.”10 Ivan Karp, of Leo Castelli Gallery, called them “very aggressive” and “couldn’t believe anybody in the world would buy one of them”—an assessment undoubtedly inflected by Baer’s gender but that nonetheless reflects the aesthetic extreme her work represented even to viewers inured to recent developments in advanced abstraction.11

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Figure 4.1 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled (Korean), 1962, oil on linen, 71 7/8 × 71 7/8 in. (182.6 × 182.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Arthur Fleischer, Jr. 95.217. © Jo Baer.

New York to Los Angeles and Back Baer took an unconventional path to becoming a Minimalist painter. Unlike Mangold and Novros, she did not pursue a fine arts degree, though she did take some art classes while studying biology at the University of Washington. An ill-fated first marriage and her desire to leave her native Seattle cut these studies short, and by her 21st birthday, she had moved to Israel for a six-month stint working on a kibbutz, after which she moved to New York City in 1950. There, she resumed her studies at the New School of Social Research, which had entered into an especially vibrant period in its history due to the presence on its faculty of many prominent European academics displaced by World War II, such as the psychoanalyst Karen Horney and sociologist Hans Speier. Baer recalled being exposed to recent currents in continental intellectualism, such as the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, “ten or fifteen years before my other artist friends had discovered suchlike names and places.”12 She took a number of classes in Gestalt psychology with, among others, Hans Wallach, a major figure in the field from its founding in Berlin and with whom she was briefly romantically involved.13 While Baer has downplayed the importance of these studies to her mature artistic practice, which they predate by more than a decade, Wallach’s research of the late forties and early fifties does anticipate elements of her Minimalist period.

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In 1948, two years before Baer matriculated at the New School, Wallach published a landmark article entitled “Brightness Constancy and the Nature of Achromatic Colors.” This study represented an early chapter in his career-spanning research into the experiential basis of perception. “Brightness constancy” refers to the condition in which the perceived color of an object is identical to its objective color, regardless of the illumination under which it is seen. In this experiment, Wallach used two slide projectors to create a display consisting of a disc surrounded by a thick annulus, each of whose luminance could be independently controlled. By holding the luminance of the disc constant and adjusting that of the annulus, he demonstrated that the former could be made to appear to be any shade of gray between white and black. Brightness, Wallach thus concluded, was a function of the ratio of luminance intensities between an object and its surrounding area.14 While I would not suggest that Baer’s Minimalist paintings directly illustrate the theories of Wallach or any other Gestalt psychologist, as have some commentators, it is noteworthy that she would go on to make work that explored the optical complexity of value contrast—a subject to which Wallach’s teachings had surely sensitized her.15 Baer contemplated pursuing a graduate degree in psychology before abruptly abandoning her studies and leaving New York for Los Angeles. While she did not set out to become an artist at this point, art did play a role in her turn away from academia. In a 2010 interview, she described visiting the home of a Yale University faculty member, at which she was struck by the fact that he had an Alexander Calder mobile hanging in his residence and that his wife was cooking while listening to a recording of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. To the young Baer, the combination of Bach and Calder painted a picture of middlebrow pretention that she found utterly distasteful. “I don’t want to be around people like this,” she recalled thinking. “This is not my world. I didn’t know what my world was, but this was not going to be it.”16 After getting off the return train to New York, she then spotted a Matisse drawing in a store window that stopped her in her tracks: “I looked at it and burst into tears, and I never went back to school. . . . I got letters from my professors . . . ‘Where are you, what has happened?’ I didn’t answer. I just quit. Matisses do that to you.”17 In Los Angeles, she briefly worked in the mailroom at CBS and aspired to further work in film or television before she met the screenwriter Richard Baer, nephew of the pioneer of American radio and television broadcasting, David Sarnoff. The couple wed following a whirlwind courtship, after which Baer found herself ensconced in Beverly Hills, dining on “steak and shrimp cocktails” and associating with celebrities such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.18 The couple honeymooned in New York, at which time they purchased a painting by the figurative expressionist painter Jan Müller from Richard Bellamy’s Hansa Gallery, marking the first instance in which she crossed paths with her eventual dealer.19 She began painting without any formal instruction in a detached studio on the couple’s property, experimenting with a variety of genres and styles. Following her divorce from Baer, she began dating the art dealer, Paul Kantor, who played a major role in first presenting the art of Richard Diebenkorn and many of the Abstract Expressionists to Los Angeles audiences. Kantor introduced Baer to the Los Angeles art scene, and she became peripherally associated with the Ferus Gallery, forming a particularly close friendship with Ed Kienholz. While she had been aware of Abstract Expressionism from time spent at the Cedar Bar when she lived in New York, it was not until this period in California that she truly engaged with it, with Gorky, Still, and Motherwell serving as important early influences.

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At Ferus, Baer met the Pop painter John Wesley, and by 1960, they had wed and moved back to New York City. In her telling, the couple had a volatile relationship marked by a fraught artistic exchange that could be by turns stimulating and stifling.20 An examination of the work made in the early years of their marriage reveals a productive and fluid back-and-forth between the two artists, during which they absorbed shared influences and freely exchanged ideas pertaining to style and subject matter. Baer worked primarily in gouache on paper from 1960–62, experimenting with a wide range of painterly idioms, from heraldic, hard-edged abstractions to Pop figuration. A series depicting columns with breasts or vulvas for capitals (fig.  4.2) displays the erotic humor for which Wesley would become best known, while her Untitled (White Star) (1960–61 fig. 4.3), one of the few extant oils on canvas made in these years, reflects the couple’s shared fascination with the declarative iconography of Jasper Johns. These works prefigure not only her mature Minimalist paintings but also the framing motifs that would recur in Wesley’s work though the sixties and seventies (fig. 4.4).21 Baer has described her then-husband as a “natural painter” and freely admitted to using colors he had mixed that she found appealing.22 Wesley introduced her to important peers, such as Judd and Flavin, granting her access to an artistic milieu that was overwhelmingly male. In her telling, the Minimalists influenced her approach to art in a fashion that was inextricably connected to gender: I found that concepts and their way of going about it fascinating. I worked on it, developed it for myself. . . . They found the female sensitivity to color and to all those things, which I can do any time, any place, no respect for it [sic].23 As indicated by these remarks, the Minimalists brought a rigor to their practices that was, in her telling, foreign to her earlier forays into painting, while her intuition for color, for which they reportedly had little regard, is attributed to her femininity (despite her acknowledgement of her husband’s own gifts in this area). There is a gender essentialism in these comments that is uncharacteristic for Baer but speaks to

Figure 4.2 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled, gouache on paper, 6 × 6 in. (15 × 15 cm). Collection of Eric Diefenbach and James Keith Brown. © Jo Baer.

Figure 4.3 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled (White star), 1960–61, oil on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (183 × 183 cm). Purchased with support from the Mondriaan Foundation. The KröllerMüller Museum, Otterlo. © Jo Baer.

Figure 4.4 John Wesley (b. 1928), Bird Girl, 1963, Duco and oil on canvas, 78 × 48 in. (198 × 122 cm). Collection of Robert and Esta Epstein. Courtesy of the artist and Fredericks & Freiser, NY.

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the significant changes that took place at this time in the way she viewed her creative pursuits, as she transformed from being a Beverly Hills housewife (an identity with which she was never at ease) to an emergent member of the downtown avant-garde.24 If Baer found her new artistic circle to be invigorating, it could also be professionally subjugating, as she found herself in the unenviable position of being an artist who was also an artist’s wife. Art historian Kirsten Swenson has described this compromised identity position as it pertained to Eva Hesse, who, during her marriage to the sculptor Tom Doyle, was widely viewed by their male peers as a hobbyist painter—someone for whom art was more an avocation than vocation. David Weinrib, a mutual friend of Doyle and Hesse’s, recalled that she “was a little in the role of wife . . . these women played a secondary role . . . the women came along as wives.”25 Lucy Lippard homed in on this phenomenon in a 1971 article, in which she outlined the myriad manifestations of sexism in the art world: “(7) identifying women artists with their men (‘that’s so-and-so’s wife; I think she paints too’).”26 So it went for Baer, who has described being widely viewed by her and Wesley’s peers as “Mrs. Wesley.” Things were little better at home, where Wesley cruelly dismissed her artistic ambitions by asking, “Do hens crow?” and even denied her the supplies to make an additional four canvases in her Koreans series because she did not have gallery representation (despite the fact that it was money from her divorce that helped keep them afloat in the early years of their marriage).27

The Koreans: “Paintings, Not Pictures” In the face of resistance at home and in the art world, Baer nonetheless completed her Koreans between 1962–63. This multi-canvas series stands as an early and important entry into Minimalism’s nascent period, predating Mangold’s first Walls and Novros’s shaped canvases and coeval with Judd’s first objects.28 However, unlike her male contemporaries, whose earliest mature work promptly received solo gallery exhibitions, Baer succeeded in placing only one of these paintings in a group show (Flavin’s aforementioned Eleven Artists) shortly after their completion. It would not be until 1971 that the series would be the subject of its own exhibition at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), where she had taught one year prior. Unlike the works she would show in her breakthrough exhibition at Fischbach Gallery in 1966, the Koreans’ black framing bands stopped well short of the canvas’s edge, leaving a sizable white border at their margins, and the inner color band—done in the same pale blue throughout the series—lined all but the top edge of the black frame. This missing blue line instead appeared above the black’s top edge, where it was accompanied by linear motifs in the paintings’ upper corners. These elements, which have been likened to Bauhaus typographics and column capitals, differentiate otherwise identical paintings, lending each its own characteristic quality.29 While the Koreans resembled her earlier White Star in key respects—sharing its palette, precise draftsmanship, and border motif—they evacuated its figurative content. Whereas White Star asserted an equivalence between image and emblem, in the manner of a Jasper Johns flag painting, the Koreans abandoned the image, relegating formal incident to the margins. With their prominent framing bands and putatively empty interiors, these paintings practically begged to be called “pictures of nothing”—a theme that did in fact arise in the rather limited criticism of her work in the sixties.30 However, Baer insisted that her work, like that of her peers, was neither nihilist, Dada-ist, nor lacking in content.

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In fact, while her use of framing motifs did allude to painting’s Albertian conventions (a topic further explored later in this chapter), Baer has described the Koreans as representing a closure of the pictorial window and an opening onto a new form of painterly activity. Commenting on this transition in an interview with Mark Godfrey, she said, “I wanted to make paintings, not pictures. And so I took the star out of the middle and made a painting.”31 In a letter to Robert Morris, she declared that only “an unusual, literary set of non-lookers” could see her as “a surreal illustrator of clean pages, empty vistas, forever-space or 19th century void.”32 Baer made it clear that her framed white planes were neither readymade blank canvases nor perspectival, spatial recesses. In fact, one could argue that the works courted associations with both of these conventions, only to negate them. Essential to this negation was the way in which the stark contrast between the paintings’ white interior and black exterior compositional elements imparted a contingent chromatic identity to the color bands, such that their appearance drastically changed with the viewer’s shifting position. This emphasis on an embodied, ambulatory mode of spectatorship has prompted art historians to align Baer’s work with the phenomenological engagements of Minimalism—a reasonable assessment, so far as it goes—but the practices of Mangold and Novros have demonstrated that painters had any number of resources with which they could posit such a mode of spectatorship and could do so for markedly different ends.33 Mangold, for example, used viewer movement to foster ambiguity between the literal and optical character of his seams, whereas for Novros, the viewer’s shifting position triggered the Murano’s transcendent chromatic effects. Not only did these practices mediate the eye/body relationship differently, but these differences were grounded in the specific form of spectatorship each artist wished to engender. Baer was attuned to such distinctions from the outset and has even described the Koreans’ genesis as being rooted in essential issues in the philosophy of selfhood: Later, as I was putting the Koreans together, I was thinking of them as portraits, but not of people. I had been reading Beckett’s The Unnamable, where he talks about osmosis through membranes, and I suddenly decided to construct these paintings as if the blue line were a membrane or a slit back to the sky, between the black outside and the light inside.34 From Baer’s account, we learn that these works not only represented a cessation of pictorial painting, but they were also a form of portraiture, though “not of people.” This assertion could appear oxymoronic. What is a portrait, after all, if not a picture of a person? Baer’s remarks suggest that the Koreans spoke to issues of identity through procedures intrinsic to painting—that the language of abstraction could in some way model the structure of the self (here we recall that every Korean had unique linear motifs in their top corners that lent each its own characteristic quality, supporting this notion that they represented a form of abstract portraiture). Invoking Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable—a novel that consists entirely of the enigmatic self-narration of a subject’s Sisyphean cycle of identity construction and dissolution—further locates her concerns squarely on the self. This aspect of Baer’s project has largely been overshadowed in the scholarly and critical literature by her interests in perceptual psychology. Her earlier training at the New School, combined with her writings on vision from the late sixties and early

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seventies, have prompted her commentators to characterize her practice as a quasiscientific pursuit, with her paintings functioning as optical studies as much as they do art. For example, art historian Patricia Kelly asserted in a recent article, “[I]n focusing on color, its luminosity, boundaries, and gradients, Baer used science to reinvigorate modern art’s criticality,”35 while the gallerist Leslie Tonkonow described Baer’s focus on her paintings’ margins as a means of “obviating the picture plane while creating an expository site for her perceptual studies.”36 In fact, the issue of optical science has so thoroughly colored the reception of her work that her Minimalist paintings are often identified as the “Mach band paintings,” referring to the optical effect discovered by the 19th-century philosopher, physicist, and psychologist, Ernst Mach, about which Baer wrote in connection to her paintings in a 1970 article in Aspen magazine.37 However, Baer’s paintings cannot be said to produce this effect in a conventional fashion. Mach bands are most commonly illustrated by placing two tonal areas close in value adjacent to one another. To enhance the contrast between the two, the eye sees a thin, dark band on the lighter side of the border and a light band on the darker side. A Baer painting, which derives its unique perceptual effects from the intense contrast between its inner white plane and outer black border, cannot be said to produce such an illusion. Instead, her paintings relate to this effect in a more oblique fashion, relying on its underlying neural mechanism in the retina that heightens contrast along borders and edges—a mechanism that will only produce Mach bands if the regions juxtaposed are sufficiently close in value.38 Baer produced the Koreans during a lull between her two most rigorous periods of engagement with science, as they appeared nine years after she terminated her studies at the New School and eight years before the publication of her first essay on optical science.39 Although these works might owe something to her studies with Wallach, she has been particularly dismissive of Gestalt psychology’s influence on her practice; when asked in an interview with Linda Boersma how her university training influenced her work, she tersely responded, “It doesn’t,” and when pressed about a possible connection between her paintings and Gestalt’s emphasis on perceptual patterns, she exclaimed, “So what? Try not to see in patterns!”40 In short, while her understanding of optical science might elucidate the perceptual mechanics behind her paintings’ distinctive color effects, it does not account for the motivation that produced them in the first place.

Baer, Beckett, and the Framing of Subjectivity Surprisingly little has been made of Baer’s interest in The Unnamable at the time of the Koreans.41 Not only is the novel a meditation on the structure of the self, but it abounds with discussion of margins, boundaries, and decenterings—motifs that powerfully resonate with Baer’s mature work. While Beckett was on many artists’ bedside tables at this time, the fact that Baer linked her paintings to a specific passage in the book suggests that her reading of it should be taken particularly seriously.42 Though Beckett does not explicitly mention “osmosis through membranes,” the following passage is likely the one to which Baer referred: [P]erhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the

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Beckett’s anonymous protagonist recounts his continuous formation and deformation at the hands of unseen narrators, who torment him by denying him the comforts of a stable sense of self. He postulates a string of possible identities for himself (Molloy from the earlier trilogy novel Molloy Dies, the abject creature named Worm, et al.), only for each to be deemed fallacious and discarded. The narrator languishes in his own contingency, forever the product of others’ whims, as he states elsewhere: “They’ve blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse it’s them I hear.”44 Beckett presents a perpetually destabilized subjectivity, for which every assertion of identity inevitably crumbles, due to the caprices of his captors (who, we are led to believe, are in fact the products of self-projection) and the constitutive provisionality of identity’s basis in language. And yet this cycle is doomed to repeat, as the novel famously concludes, “you must go on, I can’t go on, I go on.”45 As Wolfgang Iser has written, this endless deferment of self-knowledge is, in fact, the substance of the novel’s claims about self-knowledge: Every attempt at self-representation is thus transformed into a fleeting movement of “hypotheses” that elude his grasp, so that he experiences himself under the inescapable compulsion of having to continue while knowing full well that whatever he writes down can be nothing but the record of an invented, or, to be more precise, a self-inventing character. Thus what cannot be integrated is shown to be the true reality, which defies the efforts of the conscious mind to grasp it. But if the conscious mind undergoes an experience which it is incapable of integrating, this very inability to integrate enables it to acknowledge its own unfathomableness.46 Beckett’s unnamable protagonist represents the antithesis of the stable, logocentric Cartesian cogito.47 Whereas Descartes’ methodical doubt affirmed the unshakeable foundations of the thinking self, the bottomless doubt Beckett sets in motion performs the self’s essential ineffability. Tellingly, in the passage quoted earlier, Beckett’s narrator positions himself as a third term in the Cartesian mind/body dualism: “I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.” Neither mental nor physical, this is a self that has no “thickness” and no fixity. It is manifest only through the vibrations it registers from extrinsic forces.48 Without being purely illustrative, Baer’s narrow bands of color have much in common with the plight of Beckett’s narrator. Indeed, I would argue that the paintings and the novel posit a similar concept of subjectivity. Like Beckett’s protagonist, the appearance of Baer’s thin bands of color is a function of extrinsic forces. Colors that are quite saturated on close viewing unexpectedly assume an even greater brilliance from a distance, due to the optical enhancement of the adjacent black/white contrast. Baer has perceptively described this phenomenon: The white, when it’s lit, develops a glare, and it expands beyond its boundaries, like a bit of a halo, lending light to the next color. At the same time, the color band is also next to black, and something different happens there. You get a contrast effect, which is called the “negative of the second derivative.” That means that the

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black side—this is retinal, not strictly physical—will be much blacker, and the light side will be much lighter. So you’re getting light into this color line from the white and the black; the colors themselves, if you isolate them, are actually quite muddy and pale. But here they fluoresce, and in diverse ways depending on whether the painting is vertical or horizontal.49 Not only does bodily movement alter the color bands’ appearance, but the physical movement of the eye in its socket also contributes to these fluctuations. Gazing into the center of one of these paintings, the white’s optical swelling floods the eye, with the color glowing like an aura along the periphery of the visual field. Moving closer to focus on one of the margins reveals the color to be less radiant and more materially perspicuous, but a sidelong glance to the opposite margin finds the color there to have faded to “a darkened grey, a ruin of a color,” as Mark Godfrey recently observed.50 For Godfrey, Baer’s paintings held him captive in a perceptual hamster wheel: I was locked by perception into a world of distortion—nothing I could do would stabilize the color. It was impossible not to follow the band’s run around the white square. Though color was firmly stopped between black and white, it did not contain itself. Inside the band zoomed round and round, brightening and darkening with a velocity that was heightened by the stationary feel of the rest of the painting.51 “I can’t go on, I go on.” Like Beckett’s hapless narrator, Baer fates her viewer to an eternally futile quest for facticity. Her color bands are profoundly enigmatic— anti-illusionistic, yet optically elusive; eminently material, yet ultimately unknowable. Indeed, these paintings could be said to allegorize the author’s destabilized, postCartesian model of the self, transposing The Unnamable’s bottomless process of selfdiscovery into the language of abstraction. The following comments by Iser about Beckett’s trilogy could equally apply to Baer’s paintings: Beckett’s trilogy deprives the reader not temporarily but totally of his usual privileged seat in the grandstand. These characters possess a degree of self-consciousness which the reader can scarcely, if at all, keep up with. Such texts act as irritants, for they refuse to give the reader any bearings by means of which he might move far enough away to judge them. The text forces him to find his own way around, provoking questions to which he must supply his own answers.52 Iser’s observation about the reader (or for Baer, viewer) being denied “his usual privileged seat in the grandstand,” resonates all the more forcefully with Baer’s paintings as they explicitly evoke two of paintings’ conventions that predicated the medium’s truth claims on fixed viewer position: the perspectival Albertian window and Michael Fried’s notion of the deductive structure (the latter of which will be addressed later in this chapter). The thick black bands framing white fields in Baer’s works cannot fail to bring to mind the Renaissance conception of the picture as a window onto a world of illusion. Their crisp perpendiculars and undifferentiated interiors could be viewed as illustrating Alberti’s instructions for the initial steps in the creation of a picture: “First I trace as large a quadrangle as I wish, with right angles, on the surface to be painted; in this

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place it certainly functions for me as an open window through which the historia is observed.”53 In his review of her 1966 Fischbach exhibition, David Bourdon viewed her work in just such terms, arguing that it did little more than frame vacant pictorial expanses: “Miss Baer’s paintings make no claims on actual space, but instead maintain an old reliance upon pictured space. There is perhaps even less to these empty vistas than meets the eye.”54 In this view, her work could only function pictorially, not literally. And while Baer rejected such readings, her work’s appeal to the historical conventions of perspectival painting is nonetheless essential to its meaning. A brief exposition of the Albertian mode of visuality can throw into relief Baer’s subversive appropriation of this tradition. While what follows admittedly resembles what James Elkins has lamented as the “fossilization of perspective” by 20th-century critical theory—an abstracted understanding of perspective that lacks the technical diversity of its quattrocento manifestations—it nonetheless serves as a useful foil for understanding the unique purchase Baer’s work makes on the codes of pictorial painting.55 Like Iser’s reader in the grandstand, the perspectival picture locates the viewer in space via the vanishing point, the privileged position from which the painting spatially coheres. As Anne Friedberg has written, the perspectival picture is predicated on an abstracted form of vision—a way of seeing, which, while seemingly no different from everyday perception, is, in fact, wholly artificial: The perspectival image constructed from this single viewpoint also needed to be viewed from a single point, encoding the position of the viewer into its representation. Perspectival representation was dependent on two important divergences from human vision. The mobility and binocularity of vision was reduced to a static, monocular “point” of view. The vertex of single-point perspective took on the monocular view of the painter and positioned the viewer to share his vantage.56 The perspectival picture’s precisely mapped spatial coordinates create a realm that is visually coextensive with the viewer’s, suppressing the frame’s “ontological cut” between the real and the pictorial.57 From this monocular, stationary vantage point, the beholder of the Albertian painting assumes the same view as its creator and is thus ideally situated to receive the enlightening effects of its historia. Erwin Panofsky, invoking the work of Ernst Cassirer, famously described linear perspective as a “symbolic form”—a historically determined construct expressive of the cultural episteme from which it emerged.58 Perspective, Panofsky argued, was inextricably linked to issues of subjectivity: Thus the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.59 Perspective, in other words, was about mastery—of the infinite spatial surround and, by extension, of the apperceptive self; or as he stated earlier in the same essay, perspective enacted “an objectification of the subjective.”60 For Panofsky, perspective’s formal advances were epiphenomenal to nothing less than a sweeping revolution in the Western worldview:

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Once again this perspectival achievement is nothing other than a concrete expression of a contemporary advance in epistemology or natural philosophy. The space of Giotto and Duccio corresponded to the transitional, high Scholastic view of space; in the very years when their space was gradually being superseded by true central perspective, with its infinitely extended space centered in an arbitrarily assumed vanishing point, abstract thought was decisively and overtly completing the break—always disguised until now—with the Aristotelian worldview. This entailed abandoning the idea of a cosmos with the middle of the earth as its absolute center and with the outermost celestial sphere as its absolute limit; the result was the concept of an infinity, an infinity not only prefigured in God, but indeed actually embodied in an empirical reality. . . . [T]his view of space, even with its still-mystical coloring, is the same view that will later be rationalized by Cartesianism and formalized by Kantianism.61 The mode of subjectivity posited by the perspectival picture was thus underwritten by developments in the realms of theology and philosophy. The viewer who commanded the center of the picture’s infinite spatial recession assumed a posture of self-presence that was “prefigured” by the omniscient Christian God. John Berger makes this conflation explicit: Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.62 Norman Bryson’s description of the perspectival gaze elaborates on the revelatory nature of this encounter: [T]he gaze of the painter arrests the flux of phenomena, contemplates the visual field from a vantage-point outside the mobility of duration, in an eternal moment of disclosed presence; while in the moment of viewing, the viewing subject unites his gaze with the Founding Perception, in a moment of perfect recreation of that first epiphany.63 Gazing at the work of art arrests the viewer in a moment out of time, beckoning him back to a state of unity with an originary creative act. Mark C. Taylor, who has written extensively on the latent religious dimensions of Western culture, has made explicit the theological underpinnings of the feeling of self-presence described by Bryson, seeing in it an echo of man’s creation in God’s image: [T]hroughout the Western tradition, being is interpreted in terms of oneness and presence. To be is to be one, and to be one is, in some sense, to be uniquely and irreducibly present. As the ultimate ground or primal source of all being, God is the transcendent One whose complete self-identity and total self-presence are realized in absolute self-consciousness. When man is represented as the image of God, the self also appears to be self-identical, self-present, and self-conscious.64 Taylor’s description of the religious foundation of the modern conception of the self enriches Panofsky’s claim that the perspectival picture’s infinite expanse was

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“prefigured in God.” Gazing into the perspectival picture, the self seeks to affirm itself by looking outside itself, as it aspires to the centered and unified identity embodied by God. The picture thus facilitates a specular exercise, enveloping the viewer in a visual apparatus that fixes the self in time and space, allowing it to see itself as fully present. As Taylor writes, “[T]he subject must become present to itself by presenting itself to itself.”65 Film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry has similarly discussed perspectival painting as a visual apparatus whose ultimate import resides in the domain of metaphysics: Contrary to Chinese and Japanese painting, Western easel painting, presenting as it does a motionless and continuous whole elaborates a total vision which corresponds to the idealist conception of the fullness and homogeneity of “being,” and is, so to speak, representative of this conception. In this sense it contributes in a singularly emphatic way to the ideological function of art, which is to provide a representation of metaphysics.66 Of particular significance to our analysis of Baer is the vital role Baudry assigns to the frame in this metaphysical staging: “The perspective ‘frame’ . . . has as its role to intensify, to increase the effect of the spectacle, which no divergence may be allowed to split.”67 In the passage from Panofsky quoted earlier, he relates perspectival spectatorship to Cartesianism. The self centered before (and by) the picture thus becomes Descartes’s cogito—the self whose sustained cognition assures its own self-presence. Indeed, Descartes and perspective have become so thoroughly conjoined in the Western intellectual tradition that Martin Jay has described “Cartesian perspectivalism” as the dominant “scopic regime” of modernity.68 As Jay writes, the privileged vantage point assigned by the perspectival picture paved the way for the objective empiricism that was foundational to the sciences: Cartesian perspectivalism was thus in league with a scientific world view that no longer hermeneutically read the world as a divine text, but rather saw it as situated in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order filled with natural objects that could only be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral researcher.69 Assured its “privileged seat in the grandstand,” to use Iser’s phrase once more, the Cartesian subject encountered a spatial matrix that was “geometrically isotropic, rectilinear, abstract, and uniform” and thus readily mastered by the vision of a selfpossessed eye/I.70 With Descartes, we, improbably enough, come full circle back to Beckett and Baer. The perspectival painting, framed by the pictorial window, was linked to a specific conception of selfhood predicated on a metaphysic of presence. Moreover, this understanding of the self was linked to a range of cultural modalities, from the theological to the epistemological, all of which hovered at the margins of Baer’s framing bands. Gazing into these seemingly empty canvases, one might initially be willing to forgive Bourdon for seeing “an old reliance upon pictured space.” Indeed, Baer invites such a reaction only to subvert it, as the viewer’s gaze shifts from the empty center to the periphery, where one encounters the chromatic play described earlier. Rather

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than eliciting the epiphanic gaze previously described by Bryson, these works summon forth what he calls the gaze’s opposite, the glance—a vision that is furtive, embodied, and restless.71 What initially appears to be an encounter with the Albertian window thus becomes something else entirely, as the viewer paces back and forth in front of the painting, eyes darting back to the opposite margin, in an effort to fix a color that perpetually remains elusive. Rather than providing the viewer with the reassuring fiction of the Cartesian cogito, Baer’s paintings posit an alternative, arguably truer mode of subjectivity that Taylor has characterized as “errant”: The life of erring is a nomadic existence that is deeply unsettling. The nomad is an undomesticated drifter, always suspicious of stopping, staying, and dwelling. . . . Homeless and anonymous, the wanderer “doesn’t even know who he is,” doesn’t even know his identity—for he has no identity, or at least he has no identity in the proper sense of the term.72 Taylor’s description of the anonymous nomad with no “proper” identity recalls the always questing protagonist of The Unnamable. Like Beckett’s novel, Baer’s paintings reveal the contingency of identity—its constitutive relationality within a matrix of external forces. In this respect, Baer’s work could be said to have similar philosophical premises as those of her sculptor peers. For example, Rosalind Krauss’s formulation of Minimalism’s achievement could fully apply to Baer’s paintings: The significance of the art that emerged in this country in the early 1960s is that it staked everything on the accuracy of a model of meaning severed from the legitimizing claims of a private self. . . . The ambition of minimalism was, then, to relocate the origins of a sculpture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modeling its structure on the privacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural space.73 Seen in this light, Baer’s paintings make a convincing case for parity between Minimalism’s mediums. If a painting practice that critically investigated the medium’s ontology could produce the same model of spectatorship as Minimalist sculpture, then painting was clearly able to engage with the movement’s most salient issues. Indeed, one could argue that this engagement was all the more trenchant coming from painting, given the medium’s historical privileging of the private, psychological interiority that Minimalism purportedly denied. While Baer’s frame paintings might seem like premeditated statements about painting’s identity in the age of literalism, in truth, Baer arrived at them more organically than typically believed. While she has credited Beckett’s themes of margins and boundaries with their inspiration, it appears that Baer did not originally see the Koreans as being about framing per se, or at least she did not fully appreciate the ramifications of creating paintings that incorporated framing motifs. Her initial uncertainty about the series was illustrated by her curious attempt to frame the completed paintings, despite their prominent painted framing bands. As she stated in an unpublished interview with Barbara Haskell: I tried very hard to frame them. . . . I tried everything, I tried white formica, gluing it on with white double masking tape I [sic] tried Oak boards very discretely

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The Koreans seem to have resisted framing, and this resistance taught Baer a vital lesson about their identity. Or, put differently, it was only by framing their painted frame that Baer’s achievement became legible. Her attempt to frame the Koreans suggests that she initially believed them to suffer from what Jacques Derrida, in his perceptive comments about frames (which he calls parerga, in the language of Kant’s third critique), describes as painting’s constitutive “lack”: What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon [work]. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon. Without this lack, the ergon would have no need of the parergon. The ergon’s lack is the lack of a parergon . . . which nevertheless remains exterior to it.75 According to Derrida, the frame shepherds the work of art to visibility, ensuring the presence of an aesthetic unity to which it must always remain extrinsic. The frame thus constitutes a liminal surround proper to neither the work nor the space of the viewer. As Derrida continues: The parergon stands out both from the ergon and from the milieu, it stands out first of all like a figure on a ground. But it does not stand out in the same way as the work. The latter also stands out against a ground. But the parergonal frame stands out against two grounds, but with respect to each of those two grounds, it merges, into the other. With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it merges into the wall, and then, gradually, into the general text. With respect to the background which the general text is, it merges into the work which stands out against the general background. There is always a form on a ground, but the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy. The frame is in no case a background in the way that the milieu or the work can be, but neither is its thickness as margin a figure.76 Framing the Koreans would have introduced this third ground between wall and work. “Melt[ing] away” at the moment it presented the work of art to vision, the external frame would have thus posited the painted framing motif as part of a fully integrated aesthetic totality. However, as has been discussed, Baer’s painted framing bands resisted this kind of aesthetic of presence, as their color always remained indeterminate and unfixed. Viewing a framed Korean, Baer must have realized that the frame’s liminality was already intrinsic to her work. Rather than disappearing at the moment it reveals that which is framed, Baer’s painted frame is undeniably present, yet this presence always entails a kind of absence due to its variable chromatics. Furthermore, this encounter forced her recognition of another kind of absence—the “lack” Derrida identified as constitutive of pictorial painting’s claim to autonomy. At

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this point, it is worth remembering that Baer described the Koreans as signaling a profound reorientation in her practice, as they represented the end of her picture-making and the beginning of a practice of painting, suggesting that these works forced just such a newfound awareness of the ontology of the work of art.

The Fischbach Show, Diptychs, and Triptychs As the previously quoted remarks from Bellamy and Karp indicate, the Koreans enjoyed an uneasy reception and largely went unseen except by art insiders. Baer soon grew frustrated with her inability to secure gallery representation and would have destroyed the entire series were it not for Flavin’s intervention.77 To all but the most sensitive viewers, the Koreans overwhelmed with their alterity. At the time of their creation, in 1963, when most Minimalist practices were in their infancy, there was little discernible context for paintings of such radical austerity, with Stella’s stripe paintings being the only immediately evident precursor. In Baer’s description, the transition from the Koreans to the works in her 1966 Fischbach show was calculated, in part, to make the work more accessible. As she explained in an interview with Mark Godfrey, Well, no one would show the ones that had little things in the corners so I moved to what I consider the more ordinary or less original compositions because I really wanted to show work. On the other hand I found it very interesting to work with just the color. That’s when I really began to concentrate on the notion of light.78 The Fischbach works were, in a sense, more predictable than the Koreans. Abjuring the compositional choices that went into the latter’s marginal notations, the new works featured black perimeters of a uniform width that extended just shy of the framing edge and circumscribed thin color bands in a wider range of hues. Unlike the Koreans, the uniformity of these compositions thwarted the impulse to decipher individual works, instead forcing the viewer’s attention entirely on the variability of the color experience they elicited (Baer’s “notion of light” in the earlier quotation). If this shift resulted in paintings that were “less original,” they nonetheless capitalized on the lessons of the earlier series—particularly the failed attempt at framing them—resulting in works that were entirely devoted to her deconstructive poetics of enframement. Baer oversaw the carefully calibrated hanging of the Fischbach show. A suite of drawings from 1965 finds her thinking through a variety of possible installations, with much consideration going into the grouping of canvases of different sizes and orientations, as well as the amount of empty wall space to surround the work (figs. 4.5, 4.6). As indicated in the drawings, she hung the paintings close to the floor, ultimately deciding on an installation of three compact groupings of three or four canvases, plus one separate, ungrouped work.79 Noting the unconventional hanging, Lucy Lippard observed that the gallery space had been “‘composed’ for the occasion,” and indeed the exhibition must have assumed an environmental quality, as viewers would have found it difficult to determine whether a single canvas was an autonomous work or a member of a multi-canvas cluster. Thus, Lippard observed, the installation dramatically affected how one understood the work: “[M]uch upper wall space was left bare and the paintings were hung quite low, so that at a normal distance the eye met the top

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Figure 4.5 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled, gouache on paper, 10 × 23 in. (25.4 × 59.1 cm). Courtesy of Lawrence Markey Inc., San Antonio. Photograph: Ansen Seale. © Jo Baer.

Figure 4.6 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled, gouache on paper, 8 3/8 × 11 1/4 in. (21.3 × 28.6 cm). Courtesy of Lawrence Markey Inc., San Antonio. Photograph: Ansen Seale. © Jo Baer.

border and the color, instead of the central plane.”80 Aligning viewers’ eyes with the top color band discouraged a pictorial reading by foregrounding the margins’ chromatic play. Lippard acknowledged the temptation to interpret the paintings as framed voids, as Bourdon had done, but cautioned against such a misreading: The large area of white in the centers is deceptive, for white used this way is automatically read as ‘space,’ whereas Baer does not seem greatly interested in space as an active element. . . . [T]he center is not empty: it is white and flat.81 Given their divergent readings of the work, it is interesting that Bourdon’s review in the Village Voice was accompanied by a photograph of the work being viewed by a

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Figure 4.7 Installation view of Jo Baer solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1966. Reproduced in David Bourdon, “Boxing Up Space,” Village Voice, February 24, 1966. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Licensed by Getty Images.

child, who appears centered by the paintings’ white planes—an image whose misleading sense of scale supports his pictorial reading of the work (fig. 4.7). Not only did Baer hang her works low to the ground, but she also opted for a compact installation that would have discouraged viewers from seeing a work in isolation. Focusing on an individual canvas’s edge (the area of maximal formal interest) inevitably would have brought its neighbor into view. The exhibition thereby created a visual relay, continuously redirecting the viewer from to work. In this manner, the circular, hamster wheel quality of a single Baer canvas became a complex circuit, shunting the viewer’s gaze from margin to margin of multiple canvases. The diptychs and serial works that Baer began in 1966 also reflected her interest in this kind of visual interplay between individual canvases. The turn to multi-canvas paintings extended her subversion of the pictorial window. Not only did her paintings decenter vision to the framing edge, but they now propelled the viewer clear beyond the canvas’s external limits. In diptychs composed of seemingly identical canvases that were hung side by side or stacked vertically depending on their orientation, Baer dared the viewer to locate difference in a sea of overwhelming sameness (fig. 4.8). These works might seem to have the “one thing after another” modularity of a Judd or Andre were it not for their painstaking, manual execution. Avoiding the various strategies her peers had adopted as expedients for their serial work, such as collaborating with fabricators or working with readymade modular units, Baer emphatically

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Figure 4.8 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Untitled (Vertical Flanking Diptych-Blue), 1966–69, acrylic on canvas, overall: 96 × 136 in. (243.8 × 345.4 cm). Gift of Diane B. Lloyd-Butler. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. © Jo Baer.

insisted on the importance of the drudgery of studio work. “Painting minimalist is horrible,” she has said. “You have a canvas on a pair of saw horses. It’s idiot work.”82 She never used tape or rollers in her paintings, as demonstrated by the quivering edge of a color band or the slightest nub of impasto within an otherwise undifferentiated field of white. While she did not value these traces of the hand for their indexicality to the artistic process or their capacity to convey latent affect, they were nonetheless essential to her work’s perceptual properties: “I don’t care about the hand in the sense of ‘Oh wow, it’s handmade.’ But a mechanical line is dead. A hand-painted line is kept alive by light. Light jumps off every wiggle, every slight irregularity.”83 The diptychs attempt to defy the inherent fallibility of the human hand, aspiring to an impossible condition of uniformity. Despite the methodical tedium that went into their creation, differences would always emerge between the two canvas units. Unlike Robert Rauschenberg’s Factum I and II (figs. 4.9, 4.10), another exercise in painterly repetition (however dissimilar the artists’ aims and methods), in which the differences between two canvases are readily visible (e.g., a longer drip of white on the bottom right of Factum I, a narrower patch of ochre in Factum II), Baer’s diptychs challenge the viewer to pinpoint infinitesimal discrepancies, ceaselessly shuttling the gaze from canvas to canvas. One knows the two canvases are not truly identical, despite the initially overwhelming impression to the contrary, yet the task of tabulating their

© 2018 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 4.9 Robert Rauschenberg, Factum I, 1957, combine: oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and printed paper on canvas, 61 1/2 × 35 3/4 in. (156.2 × 90.8 cm). The Panza Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

© 2018 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 4.10 Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957, combine: oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and printed paper on canvas, 61 3/8 × 35 1/2 in. (156.2 × 90.8 cm). Purchase and an anonymous gift and Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest (both by exchange), The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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differences (e.g., finding a slight textural rise in the white paint surface in one and then seeking out the corresponding patch of white on the opposite canvas) seems utterly maddening, if not impossible.84 Commenting on her turn to multiple canvases, Baer has said: “[A] single painting is unique; a diptych has to do with identity—you’ve got it twice, now you know what it is; and three or more implies a continuous thing, an infinite number.”85 Identity, yes, though the certainty implied by her claim that “now you know what it is” is disingenuous. The diptychs articulate a notion of identity consistent with the greater poetics of Baer’s practice—which is to say, identity as contingent, unverifiable, and elusive. At roughly the same time that she conceived the diptychs, she also began grouping canvases into triptychs composed of discrete units identical in size and orientation but with unique hues for each color band. As in Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue (1964–65), shown in Systemic Painting, this work gave expression to a conceptual system, iterating the permutational logic of a defined set of variables. This conceptual dimension of her project had been present from the outset of her mature framing band paintings, as it governed the creation of the works shown at Fischbach, from which Primary Light Group was drawn. Her entry in Alloway’s catalogue established the parameters for the series: These paintings form part of a series of twelve. There are four colors in the series: blue, green, purple, yellow. There are also four sizes and shapes: large squares, small squares, vertical rectangles, horizontal rectangles. Each particular size and shape needs particular properties of color: intense, or pale, or grayed, or bright. The possibilities for combination or grouping of the paintings are the permutations of twelve (831,753,6000) or whatever set factors are chosen. The paintings are three large squares and they use the intense color bands. All the paintings are color in a luminous mode, but this group also renders the primary colors of light: a red (magenta), a green, a blue. They are each constructed equivalent to one another as a color presence.86 If the diptychs explored the differences intrinsic to a closed statement of identity, the triptychs opened painting to seemingly endless proliferation—“a continuous thing, an infinite number.” This new direction in Baer’s practice earned the admiration of Mel Bochner, whose response to Primary Light Group, already quoted in the earlier chapter on “Systemic Painting,” bears partially repeating: The colors . . . do not do anything . . . spatially, optically or emotionally. A schema prefigured their choice but it followed its own logical necessity and not any personalized aesthetic.  .  . . The ambiguity of Jo Baer’s work is not created by its elements, but by its existence. Her paintings are not “about” painting either as activity or thing. They remain unavailable to the emotions as well as to the intellect. They are a presence as impenetrable as reality itself, an objectification of the nothingness they frame.87 For Bochner, Baer’s work represented another manifestation of an increasingly prevalent “serial attitude.” Not only did he subscribe to this attitude in his own work, but he was one of its leading polemicists, exploring its critical and historical premises in a string of influential articles and exhibitions.88 Baer’s work served as

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a key reference point in Bochner’s accounts of the new zeitgeist, appearing in both Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art at the SVA Gallery (1966) and Art in Series at Finch College (1967). Blurring the line between art installation and exhibition, Working Drawings . . . was composed of four, identical loose-leaf notebooks resting on pedestals, each compiling photocopied preparatory drawings, sketches, plans, and scores by artists, architects, composers, and mathematicians. The exhibition thus collated the ideational processes behind a range of creative and intellectual activities, highlighting preparatory procedures and exercises rather than the final products to which they led. As James Meyer has written, “Working Drawings” made the planning stages of the work of art an object of aesthetic or intellectual interest, thereby “exposing the conceptual underpinnings of the minimal enterprise which literalism repressed.”89 In comparison to “Working Drawings,” “Art in Series” was a more conventional art exhibition in form but also more thematically focused, solely featuring artists who worked with the serial logic that Bochner upheld as the defining quality of the most advanced art of his time. In his essay, “The Serial Attitude,” published concurrently in Artforum, Bochner distinguished the subject of his exhibition from the more traditional practice of working “in series,” which he defined as artists making “different versions of a theme,” citing “Morandi’s bottles or de Kooning’s women” as examples.90 Bochner’s notion of seriality, on the other hand, described the conceptual logic behind a single work of art (Alloway’s Systemic Painting had confused this distinction). Serial art, he wrote, abided by three “operating assumptions”: 1. The derivation of the terms or interior divisions of the work is by means of a numerical or otherwise systematically predetermined process (permutation, progression, rotation, reversal). 2. The order takes precedence over the execution. 3. The completed work is fundamentally parsimonious and systematically selfexhausting.91 Unlike art made in series, the appearance of serial art was predetermined, as it was the byproduct of one of the four procedures listed in the first of the aforementioned principles. Seriality was thus a means of suppressing individual choice in the creative process. It was a “method” rather than a “style”—a means of giving expression to certain types of order that could assume a wide variety of physical manifestations. Presenting her work alongside that of artists such as Johns, Judd, Andre, Flavin, Hesse, LeWitt, and Hanne Darboven, Bochner’s shows placed Baer’s work in a markedly different context from an exhibition like Systemic Painting, as they posited a serial Baer—the painter as executor of conceptual systems. According to Bochner, Baer’s paintings resulted from the “logical necessity” of a predetermined “schema” that did not reflect the compositional choices of a “personalized aesthetic.” It is difficult to imagine Baer unequivocally embracing this characterization of her work. First, as her catalogue statement indicated, Baer’s “personalized aesthetic” was not entirely absent from the series. “Each particular size and shape needs particular properties of color,” she wrote, meaning that she disallowed certain combinations of

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variables on aesthetic grounds that had little to do with the compulsory dictums of the series, a fact Bochner either overlooked or chose to ignore.92 Second, while she appreciated seriality’s generative potential, the significance of the overarching concept never eclipsed the formal value of the individual canvases. Indeed, Baer would have likely bristled at Bochner’s claim that “[i]ndividual parts of a system are not in themselves important but are relevant only in the way they are used in the enclosed logic of the whole.”93 As we have seen, Mangold voiced a similar objection during his foray into serial painting. An individual Baer canvas was rather different from the modular units of an artist like Bochner or LeWitt. Even in works like Primary Light Group, her canvases never functioned purely as a conceptual syntax—permutational byproducts devoid of their own formal interest. Third, her work was very much “‘about’ painting”—as any painting featuring framing motifs must invariably be— despite Bochner’s claims to the contrary. Serial practices augmented the decentering operations of her individual paintings. While one canvas would lure viewers to its margins, the presence of the larger series would send them from canvas to canvas to canvas, with the frightful knowledge that this chain could extend almost indefinitely were it to achieve full expression. Unlike the stabilizing experience of the perspectival picture, a Baer series threatened to spin the viewer out into a perceptual infinity. Al Brunelle, writing in a 1968 review, fantasized about the series’ promise of a conceptual sublime: I would estimate the possible permutations to be well over 200,000; it may be that seeing all of them at once will be a lovely sensual experience, a grand work of art, like Mount Rushmore. Judgment will be deferred until the series is exhausted and the totality collected and displayed by someone like Howard Hughes.94 If Baer’s work did not fully conform to Bochner’s definition of seriality, the exhibitions nonetheless proved to be salutary contexts for her work.95 Unlike Systemic Painting, both Working Drawings . . . and Art in Series revealed her work’s kinship with developments peculiar to other mediums. While her work never relinquished its engagements with issues native to painting, being rooted in the medium did not preclude shared sympathies with sculptural practices. For example, one sketch included in Working Drawings . . . (figs. 4.11, 4.12) demonstrated a concern with sequencing and factorial progressions shared by other works reproduced in the volume, whereas another page, dense with calculations determining paint quantities and canvas sizes, reflects a dry, procedural side to her practice similar in nature to the Bernstein Brothers receipt submitted by Judd. Other Baer sketches from this period find the artist recording the various colors and formats used in previous works, ticking off the executed variants of a given schema. While Baer had previously proven that painting was capable of eliciting a spectatorial experience related to that of Minimalist sculpture, her use of seriality revealed similar connections to exist at the level of process.

Painting and “The System” If Baer’s adoption of seriality earned her a place in the Minimalist mainstream, it also subjected her work to one of the period’s most invidious interpretations of the new “minimal” art. The May 1967 issue of Arts Magazine published Herbert Marcuse’s recent lecture at the SVA, entitled “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” with Baer’s Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue reproduced on its first page (figs.  4.13, 4.14). Neither Marcuse nor Baer was involved in the selection of the

Figure 4.12 Mel Bochner, Page from “Working Drawings Book”: (Jo Baer), 1966, photocopy on paper. Image courtesy of Mel Bochner.

Figure 4.11 Mel Bochner, Page from “Working Drawings Book”: (Jo Baer), 1966, photocopy on paper.

Image courtesy of Mel Bochner.

Figure 4.13 Article by Herbert Marcuse in Arts Magazine, May 1967, 26. Reproduction of Jo Baer, Primary Light Group.

Figure 4.14 Article by Herbert Marcuse in Arts Magazine, May 1967, 27. Reproduction of Mathias Klarwein, Grain of Sand (detail), 1963–65.

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article’s illustrations (she has recalled being “mystified” when she saw the publication), and the task likely fell to Dore Ashton, who both organized the SVA lecture and was an Arts editor at the time.96 Before identifying its artist and title, a caption labeled Baer’s triptych as “Systemic Painting,” a phrase that ostensibly referred to the Guggenheim exhibition but took on new connotations in the context of the article. The opposite page presented a startling contrast: a detail of Mathias Klarwein’s Grain of Sand (1963–65)—a hallucinatory whorl of psychedelia, packed with nude pinups, celebrity portraits, landmarks of art history, and non-Judeo-Christian religious imagery. Above this image, a quotation from the article served as its lede: “if it is not the magnitude of the terror which accounts for the futility of art today, is it the totalitarian, one-dimensional character of our society which is responsible for the new situation of art?” Clearly the article’s publishers suggested that Baer’s work in some way reflected Marcuse’s analysis of contemporary culture, but the contrast between her and Klarwein’s paintings could not have been more stark. Was her work the product of art’s “futility” in an era of cultural totalitarianism, or did it hold the promise of liberation to a society in bondage? The answer, in the minds of the Arts editors, evidently was the former. Marcuse’s term “one-dimensional society” derived from his 1964 book, OneDimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, a text that endeared the author to counter-culture radicals and progressive academics alike. For Marcuse, industrialized capitalism had evolved into an integrated system of repression and control. Having reached a point where it could provide society’s most basic necessities (i.e., food, shelter), the forces of production turned to the creation of false needs, subjugating modern life to an insidious and pervasive “technological rationality.” Held under the thrall of desires that were not its own, society, Marcuse wrote, had become “one-dimensional,” incapable of coordinated resistance against a politically and culturally diffuse totalitarianism that had colonized even the most private reaches of the individual psyche: The products [of industrialized capitalism] indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. And as these beneficial products become available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life—much better than before—and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension.97 Art played a vital role in Marcuse’s theory of liberation, which charged the aesthetic imagination with conceiving alternative realities not beholden to the leveling effects of mass culture. As Barry Katz has written, [T]he artistic imperative in one-dimensional society must be to restore the alienation of aesthetic culture from established patterns of industrial civilization, to discover new forms, a new meta-language of total negation capable of communicating the experience and projecting the possibilities of people and things under the changed historical conditions of the present.98

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Moved by his recent experiences with anti-Vietnam activism, Marcuse took the SVA lecture as an opportunity to elaborate on his aesthetics in light of the emergence of the counter-culture. He opens by describing his disillusionment with the political potential of traditional modes of communication, which seem to be incapable of communicating what is going on today, and archaic and obsolete compared with some of the achievements and force of the artistic and poetic language, especially in the context of the opposition against this society among the protesting and rebellious youth of our time.99 This conviction was born out of his recent experience at an anti-war demonstration, where the collective singing of Bob Dylan songs had left him with the unshakeable belief that artistic language was “really the only revolutionary language left today.”100 This encounter with music, not in the concert hall but in the streets, convinced him that [t]he historical locus and function of art are now changing. The real, reality, is becoming the prospective domain of art, and art is becoming technique in a literal, “practical” sense: making and remaking things rather than painting pictures; experimenting with the potential of words and sounds rather than writing poems or composing music.101 For Marcuse, art’s operation in the realm of the real signaled its integration with social processes that had heretofore been dominated by the stultifying forces of production. This new type of art, which Marcuse called “art as technology and technique,” promised “the emergence of a new rationality in the construction of a free society, that is, the emergence of new modes and goals of technical progress.”102 In this way, art could remake the world: “Not political art, not politics as art, but art as the architecture of a free society.”103 The Arts editors made a didactic, if idiosyncratic, use of imagery to illustrate Marcuse’s argument. In addition to Baer and Klarwein, the article featured works by Titian, Pollock, Goya, and Kienholz, along with photographs of a Japanese rock garden, a Central Park be-in, and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67, the last of which—a utopian reimagining of urban apartment living composed of prefabricated concrete cubes—had recently been unveiled as the centerpiece of that year’s Montreal Expo ’67. Brief quotations from the article accompanied most of the illustrations, making the purposeful association of text and image explicit. While a full exposition of the article’s use of illustrations is not germane to the purposes of this study, the contrast between the final image pair—the be-in and Habitat ’67 (fig. 4.15)—and the Baer painting on the first page is instructive. Accompanied by the suggestively pithy caption, “‘New realities’?,” the counter-culture demonstration and Safdie’s visionary architecture were upheld as possible examples of the Marcusian aesthetic remaking of the world. Baer’s work, in contrast, exemplified the dead-on-arrival art of technological rationality—“systemic” art was now the art of “the system.”104 Indeed, as seen in Chapter 1, Ashton’s Mills-inspired analysis of Systemic Painting described the exhibition in just such terms.105 Such a reading would have been emboldened by the egregious manner in which Baer’s work was reproduced. Printed in black and white and at a scale that rendered the color bands imperceptible, the three canvases were each individually framed by a white surround not proper to the work, so that vertical seams appeared between

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Figure 4.15 Article by Herbert Marcuse in Arts Magazine, May 1967, 31.

each canvas. The resulting illustration made the black framing bands appear as if readymade and stamped onto a white background, one after another after another. In this way, the “mind cramping . . . intuition of infinity” that Bochner had seen in Baer’s seriality became the oppressive infinity of mass production. As Timothy J. Lukes has written in his description of Marcuse’s aesthetics, the cultural theorist considered this art of the one-dimensional society to have a repressive effect similar to that of socialist realism, though its operations were arguably even more pernicious: Just as socialist realism assists in the sedation of the Soviet population by repressing alternatives, so does the “instrumental” art of technological rationality assume a supportive rather than antagonistic or transcendental posture. However, there is no longer a need for censors and propaganda ministers, for while socialist realism was fed by its opposition to reactionary alternatives, instrumental art recognizes no alternatives. The art of this society loses its ability to disquiet its constituency, because disquieting natural forces are tamed by scientific production.106 In truth, it is difficult to imagine Baer’s paintings ever having such an “instrumental,” pacifying effect, and she of course would have objected to such a characterization of her work. In an essay published as part of an Artforum symposium on art and politics in 1970, she in fact argued that her work had an implicit political valence not dissimilar to that theorized by Marcuse. While she did not explicitly mention her work in the essay, her description of contemporary “radical art” as that which jettisons figure/ground relationships (“paintings that picture their own shapes”) and reintegrates “color with black and white” certainly evokes her own paintings. Such art, she argued, carried “political implications that bear on the sovereignty of the subject and ramifications of self-determination.”107 Baer, like many Minimalist artists, believed that the heightened state of perceptual sensitivity her work elicited could in some measure contribute to the political awakening of the individual.108 As we saw in Chapter 2, Lucy Lippard had advanced a similar argument about Mangold’s work. However, the Arts Magazine editors evidently felt otherwise, and the Marcuse article represented one in a series of episodes in Minimalism’s history in which its art was taken to be complicit with the forces of mass culture.109 Painting, by virtue of its handmade and studio-bound production, had generally (though, as we have seen with the reviews of Systemic Painting and Walls and Areas, not always) been immune to this line of criticism, so in this respect, Baer had more in common with her sculptor peers than she probably would have desired.

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The Frames of Sixties Painting As both Bochner’s exhibitions and the Marcuse article demonstrate, by the late sixties, Baer’s work had been widely recognized as a notable entrant into the wider field of Minimalist practice. What had bewildered Karp and Bellamy in 1963 now had a readily discernible context. Further clarifying Baer’s achievement was the fact that two other prominent painters had by this point created bodies of work that featured framing motifs. A brief analysis of these paintings by Ralph Humphrey and Jules Olitski further illuminates the significance of painted framing bands at this time. Humphrey painted his so-called Frame paintings from 1964–65, displaying them as a group at Green Gallery in ’65 (Plate 10). With their wide framing bands painted in muted pastel tones surrounding gray interiors, these works shared Baer’s marginal application of color framing putatively blank fields. While important differences existed between these two bodies of work—Humphrey’s framing bands were composed entirely of color and his subtly varied facture emphasized painterly incident and the artist’s hand in a way that hers did not—they nonetheless both explored related themes of medium ontology and viewer subjectivity. Peter Schjeldahl, in a perceptive essay on this series that finds common cause with my own reading of Baer, has described Humphrey’s works as “elegiac, worried paintings” that thematized the medium’s embattled status in the age of literalism.110 “With their painted borders,” he writes, “Humphrey’s Frame paintings picture a condition of picturing to which he, as an artist intelligently responsive to art’s changing estate, no longer had recourse: the sheltering and intensifying non-space of the frame.” Schjeldahl attributes the diminished presence of the frame in sixties painting, not to the polemics of Minimalist sculptors, but to the teleology of modernist painting (though of course the two were thoroughly entwined). He describes how the evolution of abstract painting had affected its correlative aesthetics of enframement: [F]or pictures that, however modernized, clung to the traditional sense that a picture is a world necessarily separate from the real world—the imperative of abstraction reached a point where the most vestigial strip of wood or metal served as a “word to the wise,” laconically calling forth the protocol that let a picture be a picture.111 In Schjeldahl’s concise genealogy, Rothko, an artist of great importance to Humphrey, was the painter who abandoned this “protocol,” presenting his paintings unframed so as to create a more immediate aesthetic encounter. For Humphrey, the jettisoning of the frame was also an act of disenchantment—a recanting of the artist’s belief in painting’s existence as a discrete virtual realm. His frame paintings memorialized the pictorial window while also inverting the conventions of Rothko’s signature style. Humphrey emptied the center of his paintings, deploying the older artist’s brushy, sensuous color to frame the hollow he had left in the pictorial tradition. Schjeldahl argues that Humphrey’s statement about painting’s ontology was also, by extension, a statement about viewer subjectivity, just as it had been for Baer. He writes, The grayness [in Humphrey’s paintings] is a wanly songful metaphor of subjectivity rendered homeless and drifting through loss of such security as a picture gains from a picture frame. The painted border is something lost that the grayness remembers or dreams of, and sings.112 The homelessness Schjeldahl describes is reminiscent of the errant, nomadic subjectivity posited by a Baer painting. Both artists understood the frame to function as a

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stabilizing presence, spatially and temporally situating the viewer so as to stage the aesthetic encounter. A painted frame in the place of a physical one amounted to an acknowledgement that this topos of the Western artistic tradition was in some way lost to the modern era. However, if Humphrey’s paintings eulogized this loss, Baer’s reveled in it, seeing the pictorial window’s closure as an ecstatic opening onto a new form of perceptual play. Baer’s and Humphrey’s interpretation of painted framing bands was not the only one in circulation in the mid-sixties. Beginning in 1965 (the same year as Humphrey’s exhibition), Jules Olitski introduced a similar motif to his sprayed paintings. Taking an already sprayed canvas, he would mask two or three sides, spray more, and then remove the masking to reveal sharply delineated edges that introduced an element of linear containment to his otherwise amorphous atmospherics, though the borders these edges created were themselves as vaporous as the fields they delimited. As seen in a work like Patutsky in Paradise (1966, Plate 11), in which the artist masked three edges, these framing bands varied in thickness and, at times, deviated from the perpendicular, allowing artistic intuition to enter into an otherwise “deductive” (in the Friedian sense) process. The topmost, unmasked edge (Olitski never masked all four sides) suggests the possibility of the color field’s infinite extension and also precludes a spatial reading, in which the interior could be seen as pictorial background or void.113 Olitski began using these framing elements at a crucial juncture in Michael Fried’s practice as a critic, during which he augmented his critical model—heretofore centered around the Greenbergian concept of opticality—with the supplementary but related category of “shape.”114 This shift came in response to the mounting threat of Minimalist sculpture, which, he wrote, “hypostatized” shape, forsaking its identity as art by embracing a state of mere “objecthood.”115 To inoculate itself against the corrosive effects of literalism, he wrote: [M]odernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood, and that the crucial factor in this undertaking is shape, but shape that must belong to painting—it must be pictorial, not, or not merely, literal.116 Shape, for Fried, had emerged as the critical front in modernism’s war against Minimalist theatricality. For modernist painting to survive, it had to wrest shape from literalism’s clutches, or as he put it elsewhere—shifting his metaphorical register from combat to convalescence—“to restore shape to health.”117 In the paintings about which he wrote most extensively at this time—Noland’s attenuated diamonds, Stella’s Irregular Polygons, and Olitski’s sprayed canvases—Fried described a dialectical tension between literal and depicted shape, the sublation of which yielded a painting capable of “hold[ing] or stamping[ing] itself out or compel[ling] conviction as shape.”118 Only by acknowledging the literal shape of the support did these paintings assert a shape that was convincingly pictorial, which is to say that only by acknowledging modernism’s imperiled status did they secure a victory, however tenuous, for modernism. Unlike Noland and Stella at this time, Olitski continued to work with conventional rectangular formats, which made his masked framing bands all the more important to Fried’s newfound emphasis on shape. Describing the earlier sprayed paintings, which did not make use of any masking, he writes: Those pictures are completely devoid of depicted shape. . . . At the same time, no paintings have ever depended so completely or so nakedly for their success on the

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Jo Baer shape (and in particular the proportions) of their supports. . . . It is, I think, true of those paintings—and no others—that they succeed as paintings just so far as they succeed, or hold, or stamp themselves out, as shapes.119

In the absence of any internal pictorial structure, the aesthetic merits of Olitski’s chromatic vapors were entirely a function of the literal shapes that contained them. In Fried’s estimation, the artist’s narrow vertical canvases generally succeeded because they made pictorial illusion “self-sufficient, a presence, like that of a human figure,” whereas the horizontal rectangles were more likely to fail because they read “as something like background in traditional painting.”120 The introduction of the masked framing bands, which Fried described as “something like depicted shape,” relieved the paintings’ literal shape of this burden.121 By being both structural and consubstantial with the interior fields, these partial frames mediated a work’s literal and pictorial properties: [B]ecause the boundary between the framing bands and the rest of the painting consists of the same pictorial stuff—the same sprayed color—as the areas it delimits, the role of the internal “frame” as a kind of middle term between the shape of the support and the rest of the painting is far more complex than that played by depicted shape in Noland’s paintings or Stella’s stripe paintings. To be sure, the internal “frame”—more accurately, the boundary between the “framing” bands and the rest of the painting—relates structurally to the shape of the support. But it also establishes an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented continuity across that boundary. This enables the paintings in question to contain depicted shape, or something like it, and yet be seen as pictorially seamless and integral—like the early spray paintings.122 With the literal edge of the canvas no longer functioning as the paintings’ only structural element, Olitski was able to pursue a greater variety of formats. The framing bands, Fried concluded, were a “terrain of extraordinary freedom and possibility” that facilitated herculean feats of formalism: It is as though as long as he remains close to the limits of the support Olitski can do whatever he wants: repossess the square, use the horizontal rectangle without alluding to the horizon, even resurrect Abstract Expressionist brushwork. . . . [T]he best of the recent paintings, although in one sense imageless, provide an image of an achieved freedom that is nothing less than exalting.123 For Fried, Olitski’s framing bands were the fulcrum for his paintings’ claims to the pictorial. Unlike Humphrey and Baer, for whom this motif signaled the foreclosure of pictorial painting, Fried saw it as the dialectical grounds for the tradition’s heroic renewal. Acknowledging the literal shape of the support enabled an Olitski to “stamp out” a shape that was proper to painting and to “compel conviction” in its legitimacy. Most importantly, this sense of conviction meant the work of art had “suspended” or “defeated” its objecthood, imparting to the viewer a state of “presentness,” which Fried famously equated with “grace”—a state of metaphysical plenitude whose impossibility Humphrey’s paintings lamented and Baer’s enacted through its endless deferral.124

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“Why Don’t You Use Pink?”: Baer Amongst the Modernists This fundamental difference between Baer’s paintings and the modernist paradigms of Fried and Greenberg warrants further elaboration, especially given that her work—at least in a superficial reading—would appear to comply with their formalist prescriptions. Such was the initial reaction of Mark Godfrey (before discovering the peculiarities of Baer’s color on closer viewing): “It seemed like the kind of painting that was inevitable by the mid-1960s. Baer gave orthodox modernist answers to questions of flatness, and deductive composition, while demonstrating a post-Frank Stella attitude to expressionism and facture.”125 Similarly, Barbara Haskell, writing on the occasion of the artist’s 1975 Whitney Museum retrospective, described the frame paintings as a routine exercise in Friedian deductive structure: [Baer] eliminated hierarchical orderings by relating her shapes exclusively to the painting’s framing edge rather than to other analogous shapes on the field. Thus her images are generated by the demands of the structure itself rather than by an order outside the work.126 Moreover, in some of her own writings, Baer appeared to align her thought with Greenberg’s criticism. “Clement Greenberg somewhere describes modern art as a continuous, foliating self-criticism of the art,” she wrote in a 1966 letter. “I agree.”127 Her article in Aspen magazine four years later (well after Greenberg and Fried’s high-water mark) expressed a similar faith in the dialectics of modernist formalism: Advanced art is radical, and radical in its most literal meaning describes a root, base, foundation. Advanced art is thus an art which works for and effects change, within the general Modernist dialectic, towards a more basic and particular substance of art. At present, a radical redefinition of current painting is pertinent and possible.128 These remarks suggest a commitment to a Greenbergian notion of medium specificity, to making an art that was self-critical and inwardly directed. Indeed, a painting practice that investigated the conventions of framing was undeniably addressing medium-specific issues. And yet, as should now be evident, Baer’s interrogation of the medium yielded markedly different conclusions from the practices advocated by Greenberg and Fried. Patricia Kelly has attributed this divergence to Baer’s interest in an ambulatory and embodied spectator—a fair assessment, though one that does not fully address the issues of subjectivity and (as will be seen) gender that such a mode of spectatorship subtended.129 Greenberg took a passing interest in Baer’s work shortly after the publication of her controversial 1967 Artforum letter to the editor (the contents of which will be discussed in detail later in this chapter). Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit in her acerbic rebuke to Judd and Morris, he reached out to her, though as she has recalled, their differences were soon made readily apparent: I remember a conversation he and I had about color. Clem said, “Jo, you know this is all very well,” by which he meant that he couldn’t promote my work if it was all white and gray. Too stark. “Why don’t you use pink or some other color?”

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Jo Baer he said. And I said, “Because Ken Noland already does that. You don’t need me doing it.” By which I meant that he had misunderstood what I was doing anyway. I wasn’t a Color Field painter. I was working with degrees of light, and he wasn’t paying attention to that.130

This suggestive passage points to emergent tensions pertaining to both aesthetics and gender between artist and critic. To Greenberg, Baer’s open white or gray rectangles cried out for color. He had, after all, singled out the rectangular formats of Rothko and Newman for the way in which they facilitated color’s total and instantaneous optical disclosure: “The rectilinear is open by definition: it calls the least attention to drawing and gets least in the way of color-space.”131 However, such an “open” and immediate color experience, as we now know, was precisely the opposite of that imparted by Baer’s paintings. A 1968 letter to Greenberg (not published in her collected writings) reflects the increasing friction between the two: I am roughly as ambivalent to your thought these days, as you appear to my work.  .  . . [My] paintings manifest a radical color theory which no one has noticed or treated of as such or as yet. It is possible the art is too dense or too blank for reviewers, or for you, or conversely.  .  . . [A] “color” becomes determined by its illuminator’s particular size and shape, and also by the total constellation of the work itself. . . . “Color” is the differential reflection/absorption of light on surfaces, and paint is a colloidal substance which conveys reflecting/ absorbing materials to surfaces. The best way to locate and appreciate “color” is through this intensive definition of it as light; “black” is a film rendering an absence of light; “white” films reflect the entire range of light; and a “color” is any film reflecting/absorbing light on this scale of all to none. . . . You may appreciate how your written notice of modern arts’ historical, “formalist” means is as necessary and pertinent to my paintings, now, as it was to color-field paintings then, whenever.132 This letter reflects her growing interest in color’s foundation in the science of light, a significant preoccupation of hers in the late sixties.133 This literal understanding of color, she argues, represents a radical break from established critical discourses, particularly Greenberg’s own. At this time, not only was Greenberg calling for a declarative, “post-painterly” color that “opens and expands the picture plane,”134 but he had defined this color in opposition to “painterly abstraction,” which, he wrote, “remains altogether within the tradition of value painting—of painting that relies for its main emphases on contrasts of light and dark.”135 Baer naturally disagreed with the claim that black-and-white contrast was ineluctably illusionistic and haptic, as she stated in a 1974 interview: Greenberg said that one should not use “value-color” in painting, that is to say different gradations of shades, since that creates too much depth and makes the painting resemble sculpture. But that is not completely true because in saying so, Greenberg ignores painters like me who are capable of using color and black and white and preserving a flat surface that is not at all sculptural.136

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Furthermore, her works resisted the spectatorial experience post-painterly abstraction was said to elicit—a form of instantaneous self-actualization, related (though not identical) to Fried’s notion of “presentness”: [I]deally the whole of a picture should be taken in at a glance; its unity should be immediately evident, and the supreme quality of a picture, the highest measure of its power to move and control the visual imagination, should reside in its unity. And this is something to be grasped only in an indivisible instant of time. . . . And to apprehend this “at-onceness” demands a freedom of mind and untrammeledness of eye that constitute “at-onceness” in their own right. The picture does this to you . . . a mere glance at it creates the attitude required for its appreciation. . . . You become all attention, which means you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention.137 Baer’s paintings, of course, denied such an experience of “at-onceness.” Her color bands could not be “taken in at a glance,” but rather asserted a contingent chromatic identity that was a function of the “total constellation” of a work’s composition and the viewer’s position. What is more, these constellating forces consisted of broad expanses of black and white, a value contrast that nonetheless remained resolutely flat and anti-illusionistic, as she explained in a letter to Robert Morris: A painting is an object which has an emphatic surface. On such surfaces, I paint a black band which does not recede, a color band that does not obtrude, a white square or rectangle which does not move back or forth or to or fro or up and down. . . . Every part is painted and contiguous to its neighbor: no part is above or below any other part. No part looks like it is above or below any other part. There is no hierarchy. There is no ambiguity. There is no illusion.138 Clearly then, Baer would have been an uneasy fit in Greenberg’s coterie of modernist painters. However, her anecdote about the critic suggests that their differences ran deeper than their disparate formalisms. How might being a woman have inflected Baer’s interactions with Greenberg? After all, he did not want her to fill in her white planes with just any color: he wanted them pink. It is difficult not to see the thinly veiled sexism in Greenberg’s critique. A broad plane of pink would have mitigated the severity of Baer’s style, resulting in unabashedly decorative paintings that would be seen as more becoming of her gender. In short, Greenberg’s friendly suggestion was another manifestation of what art historians such as Lisa Saltzman and Marcia Brennan have described as a recurrent trope in modernist criticism—the inscription of gender onto abstraction.139 Baer herself appears to have been acutely sensitive to Color Field painting’s latent gendering, as seen in a 1970 essay in which she dubbed the movement a “sexual solipsism.”140 Read in this light, Baer’s riposte—“Ken Noland already does that. You don’t need me doing it.”—becomes all the more pointed. Baer confronted Greenberg with the fundamentally decorative (and thereby potentially feminine) nature of much Color Field painting, a quality that, as Saltzman has written, its modernist advocates took pains to repress through a masculinist rhetoric of heroic genius and control.141 Told to feminize her work, Baer reminded Greenberg of the slippery gender codes on which his own pantheon of artists so precariously rested.

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Brennan’s analysis further nuances the tensions between Baer and Greenberg by linking the gendered language of modernist criticism back to the issues of subjectivity formation discussed earlier in this chapter. She argues that the critic’s concept of opticality, despite its abrogation of corporeality, was inherently coded as male: [T]he purposeful disavowal of embodiment and tactility that threads through sixties accounts of Louis’s and Noland’s artworks was not accompanied by a corresponding loss of gendered identity. Instead these critical discourses only seemed to foster new ways to envision idealized expressions of masculine creativity, as the artists became associated with a sense of universal subjectivity that enabled them to be seen as disembodied and heroically masculine at once.142 In this way, modernist formalism could be said to have “lost its body but kept its gender.”143 Brennan describes the painting practices of Noland, Louis, et al. as engaging in a form of “incarnational aesthetics,” in which the artist invests the work of art with a transubstantiated subjectivity, so that paintings become “identified as idealized, symbolic surrogates of their makers,” despite the putative absence of any tangible markings indexical to the artist’s body (e.g., a gestural brushstroke).144 In contrast to a female artist, like Helen Frankenthaler, whose femininity was consistently made central to critical accounts of her work (often through the use of bodily metaphors such as menstrual “staining,” “bleeding,” etc.), male Color Field painters had access to a disembodied mode of subjectivity, to which critics ascribed the virtues of their masculinity.145 This projection of subjectivity onto the Color Field canvas is particularly made evident by Noland’s own description of the disembodied presence he wished to impart to his work: “Imagine yourself looking across a street at a crowd [of] pedestrians. Suddenly one of them glances your way, like that quality of connection I’d like those colors to have—but abstractly.”146 Noland describes a moment of intersubjective exchange, in which the work of art affirms viewer subjectivity through an imagined reciprocal recognition made possible by the subject-like presence immanent to the painting. Such an encounter recalls the specular operations of the perspectival picture described earlier in this chapter, in which the viewer achieves self-presence through a dialectical visual engagement with the work of art, finding himself by looking outside himself. I use the male pronoun here intentionally, for as Brennan demonstrates, modernist criticism, in theorizing this metaphysic of self-presence, coded it as masculine. The masculinist underpinnings of modernist criticism and the Color Field practices it supported invite the question: to what degree, if any, can Baer’s refusal of their formalist precepts and attendant mode of spectatorship be understood as a feminist gesture? Given her work’s performance of subjectivity’s inherent instability, it certainly cannot be said that her work asserted an essentialized feminine counter-identity to the modernist masculine hegemony. Indeed, in her statements about her experiences as a woman artist in the sixties, she has expressed ambivalence towards feminism. “The feminists had a problem with me,” she recalled. “They used to call me a female man, because I was successful in the male world. I wasn’t painting vaginas like Judy Chicago.”147 In 1972, she refused to participate in the Kunsthaus Hamburg exhibition, “American Woman Artist,” stating that it was a “retrograde step towards establishing a women’s ghetto that heretofore has not existed” and encouraging its curators to “direct your attention and energies outside the art world to combat the many real

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discriminations waiting there.” Baer has at times described the sixties art world as a genderless meritocracy—“Art exists sans gender, race, religion.  .  . . [O]nly the work counts,” she told the Hamburg curators149—and elsewhere claimed that she was discriminated against “as a painter, much more than as a woman.”150 However, as discussed earlier in this chapter, Baer’s own experiences in the art world belie these statements. Even before moving to New York with Wesley, while living in Los Angeles, she staged what Judith Stein has described as “proto-feminist performance art,” such as when she attended a Ferus Gallery opening wearing a man’s undershirt and boxer trunks with red satin balls dangling from the crotch and asked the crowd, “Okay, guys, do I have enough balls to be in a show here?”151 In a 2003 interview with Stein, she added that as a woman artist she had to be “rude,” stating, “It’s the only way to be, if you’re female. You don’t get anywhere otherwise.”152 What is one to make of Baer’s conflicting statements about gender in the art world? Do her comments to the Hamburg curators reflect her blindness to her own relative degree of privilege as someone who had established herself in a creative milieu to which few women artists had access? While that might partially explain her response, one might also view it as a more principled objection to the second-wave feminism of her generation, with its politics of inclusion and essentialized identity (recall her disdain for “painting vaginas like Judy Chicago”). She has described the resentment she harbored towards organized feminism for compromising her standing amongst her male peers: “I didn’t have any trouble as a woman, until feminism became an issue. Then I started being asked to be the token woman at meetings, which I declined.”153 If there was a feminism to her practice, it was of a “third-wave” variety (however avant la lettre), dedicated as it was to the critique of subjectivity and the subversion of fixed concepts of identity. Her contingent chromatics and the enigmatic aesthetic encounter they elicited resisted easy gender coding. The nomadic subjectivity posited by these paintings denied the Cartesian foundations of the modernist masculinist regime of ontological self-possession and visual mastery.154 Unlike Color Field painting, which “lost its body but kept its gender,” Baer’s paintings retained the body yet were genderless, and therein lied their feminist potential.155

The Artforum Letter As noted earlier, Baer’s personal tensions with Greenberg arose shortly after her 1967 letter to the editor had effectively alienated her from Minimalist circles. This letter was by far the most impassioned and thorough rebuttal by a painter to the period’s “death of painting” critiques. It irrevocably altered the course of her career, perhaps even foretelling her abandonment of both Minimalism and New York in 1975. She recalled: After the letter came out, I remember being at a party at the Smithsons’. Everybody in the place was totally hostile to me. . . . Mel Bochner came over to my place and returned books and magazines he had borrowed saying, “I can’t speak with you anymore.” These things really happened! Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 24. Her relationship with Judd and Flavin had cooled somewhat earlier, after she confronted Judd over his claims about painting in his 1965 Noland review during a dinner party. According to Baer, the discussion grew so contentious that Judd left the party, taking Flavin with him.156 The Artforum letter damaged more than her

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relationships with fellow artists; it also affected her institutional standing in the larger New York art world. The letter apparently drew the ire of Leo Castelli, resulting in Philip Leider, then the magazine’s editor, blacklisting her from the publication (though he ultimately relented after Greenberg intervened on her behalf).157 Even her dealer, Richard Bellamy, an expert at negotiating the period’s rival factions, admonished her, “Who the hell do you think you are, attacking Robert Morris?”158 What could Baer have said to so quickly and decisively render herself a pariah? Her exile was most likely a product of both what she said and how she said it. Flippant in tone yet rigorous in substance, Baer wrote with an irreverence that punctured the academic self-seriousness of much Minimalist discourse. The letter methodically addressed Judd and Morris’s critiques of painting in “Specific Objects” and “Notes on Sculpture, Part III” respectively, and responded with clever parries directed at their own practices (with Flavin’s thrown in for good measure). Her argument boiled down to three key issues: allusion, materiality, and illusion. By “allusion,” Baer meant the pictorial. “Morris restricts his critique to mundane allusion,” she wrote. “[H]e believes a painting is necessarily a picture of something”—a presumption her work patently refuted.159 Allusion, she continued, was “ubiquitous”— “all art always alludes to something else”—implying that Minimalist sculptors were no less encumbered by conventions and quotidian associations than painters: “If not all sculptures are statues, and not all cubical specific-objects boxes, then not all paintings are pictures.”160 In an earlier letter to Morris (which went unanswered), she lent this last point an added sting, admitting that she once rested her purse on one of his mirrored cubes, confusing it for a table.161 Turning to materiality, she took on Judd’s materialist aesthetics, arguing that painting could possess the same kind of literal presence as any other form of art. Whereas Judd had asserted that “Oil on canvas are familiar .  .  . [and] especially identified with art,” Baer countered that these materials are “no more or less identified with art” than any other material, including “lacquer and metal, acrylic and plexi.”162 Baer could have elaborated on this jab at Judd’s preferred materials, as she did in an earlier letter to Michael Fried, in which she pointed out that they in fact have a formidable artistic pedigree: “[Judd] insists on new, ‘non-art’ materials as a critical standard, yet he works, in the main, with sheet metal and lacquer, as old in art as Calder and the Orient.”163 In her letter to Morris, she further developed her literalist understanding of painting, foreshadowing the scientific orientation of her later writing: Surely you perceive an actual, physical nature which is light? Which is, moreover, prior and necessary to visual mass? Consider paint a film of light reflecting/ absorbing material, and a colored paint a material which gives a particular, characteristic transmission of light via differential absorption and reflection. Call this quality “luminance” and measure it in millilamberts. The measure is real and as present as height, breadth, and depth.164 Here, Baer advanced a line of thinking also found in her previously quoted letter to Greenberg from the following year. These letters theorize a radical equivalency of materials, in which paint is, at bottom, no different from any other substance used in art, in that it established a surface that reflected and absorbed specific frequencies of light. Unlike Judd, she refused to impute intrinsic aesthetic merit to certain materials,

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on the grounds that no specific absorption/reflection ratio could be deemed inherently superior to any other. Instead, she argued, aesthetic value lay in how these ratios were deployed relationally and the ideas that obtained therein (in other words, in the act of composition): Judd has tacitly confused the novel with the radical. He implies that any vacuformed plexi-bas-relief is automatically superior to any contemporary ideated marks on a flat surface. But ideas are ideas. Techniques and materials are not ideas. Ideas and materials have a functional relationship, not an identity.165 Thus, while Baer claimed a literalist identity for painting, the literal was not in and of itself sufficient grounds for aesthetic valuation. In fact, she argued quite the opposite, that the sculptors’ predilection for novel materials often resulted in their works’ aesthetic insufficiency: If oil and canvas did confer a familiar quality “especially identified with art,” there are those who would count this an especial virtue of the materials; there is not new, esthetic value served in an arrangement of lamps anywhere but the ceiling, or in mirrored cubes confounded with moderne tables. . . . Those works which do depend on the “unfamiliar” require intensive propaganda to establish and maintain the small art quality in their amalgam; the printer then provides “that familiar quality especially identified with art.”166 Here, Baer levels the now familiar charge of Dadaism: the readymade elements of Minimalist sculpture (e.g., fluorescent tubes, mirrors) resulted in aesthetically impoverished objects that required a linguistic supplement (provided by “the printer”) to shore up their identity as art. Given her earlier sense of kinship with these artists, this indictment was most likely not entirely ingenuous, but it nonetheless stands as a biting critique of her peers’ regular contributions to the monthly art journals. While Judd and Morris were her letter’s primary targets, Baer included Flavin in her critique of Minimalist sculpture’s use of the readymade, as seen in the passage quoted above. Later in the same text, she compares his sculptures’ luminous glow to the “fluffy likeness of an Infinite Mazda.” Given Flavin’s early advocacy of her work— featuring her in the Kaymar show and saving the Koreans from destruction—this putdown might come as a surprise, yet the Artforum letter makes it clear that she could not find any aesthetic value in his appropriation of the fluorescent tube. This view appears to have been related to her increased attention to paint’s status as a conveyor of light, as indicated in her letter to Morris: “Light: not ‘lamps,’ which are complicated artifacts many removes from a primary physicality, and which are qualified by industry and the market, not by esthetic concerns. . . . I make paintings which do not represent light, they are light.”167 Fluorescent tubes, for Baer, appear to have been a facile means of engaging what she considered an infinitely complex subject. Whereas the aura created by her color bands was a function of any number of finely calibrated compositional choices, the fluorescent tubes’ effects were, in her view, entirely predetermined by their manufacturer.168 Baer’s argument about illusion, the final issue her letter addressed, is by now a familiar one. Against Judd’s claims that any mark on canvas is ineluctably illusionistic

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and that any two or more adjacent colors establish ipso facto spatial relationships, she argued that painting could assert a flat, non-illusionistic surface: [A]nything on a surface becomes that surface; it has no space behind it; it has its support (canvas, board, steel) behind it. . . . Some recent paintings look as if their colors might be continuous right through the object to the wall. Some recent wall boxes look hollow. . . . [T]wo colors on the same surface can always be made to lie on the same depth. The ability to accomplish, and apparently to see this, distinguishes the painter from the sculptor.169 Baer’s description of Judd’s boxes as “hollow” echoed Fried’s critique in “Art and Objecthood,” a text with which she was well acquainted.170 For Fried, the hollowness of the Minimalist object was a sign of its anthropomorphic presence, but for Baer, it spoke to its latent illusionism, as indicated in her letter to the critic quoted earlier: Nor is [Judd] as “literal” as his pose suggests. The lacquered surface detaches quite readily from its object. The object is not red; it is covered by a red film. That is, he tries for an immaterial glow, not for a dense red object. . . . [H]ave you never felt the immediate, implausible, unlikelihood of those wall pieces? They are original, peculiar, and perhaps not at great odds with your criteria.171 Here, Baer argued for something like an optical Judd, describing her perception of dematerialized color hovering against the sculpture’s galvanized iron armature, and suggests that his work might engender an experience not unlike Fried’s ideal of “presentness.” Such a reading, when combined with the first subject of the Artforum letter, reveal Baer to have found both illusion and allusion in Judd’s art, though through an altogether different line of reasoning from that found in Rosalind Krauss’s landmark article of the prior year.172 The Artforum letter’s repudiation of key Minimalist figures foreshadowed Baer’s ultimate renunciation of her own Minimalist idiom in 1975. In the paintings she made through the end of the decade, she explored variations of her framing band motif, in the Double Column series (fig. 4.16) and Wraparounds (fig. 4.17). By 1970, she had turned her attention to the so-called Radiator paintings (fig. 4.18), a significant stylistic departure which ultimately proved to be a cul-de-sac briefly explored before abandoning both abstraction and the New York art world entirely in 1975, just after her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney.173 These developments have been recounted elsewhere and postdate Baer’s period of sustained involvement with Minimalism’s artistic milieu.174 What is remarkable about this chain of events is that only one year before effectively tendering her resignation from Minimalism with her Artforum letter, she had attempted to document the movement’s emergence in her “Dialogues,” the project mentioned at the opening of this chapter—an about-face that illustrates the volatility of the period. The “Dialogues” consisted of a diverse array of exchanges with little in the way of a common thread: a trade of works with Sol LeWitt; a questionnaire submitted by Robert Smithson, which she completed entirely in cheeky alliteration; a series of quotations about the nature of perception from Dan Graham, interspersed with her own exegetical remarks; her interview with an obviously irritated Judd about his views on painting; an early thesaurus piece by Bochner; and a poem by Carl Andre,

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Figure 4.16 Jo Baer (b. 1929), Grey Side-Bar: Green Line, 1975, oil on canvas, 72 × 72 × 1 1/2 in. (182.88. × 182.88 × 3.81 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by the Hauptman Family Foundation, Alice and Nahum Lainer, and the Peter Norton Family Foundation (M.2007.36). Digital image ©2018 Museum Associates /LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

to which she responded with an analysis relating it to his sculpture, much to his consternation. Together these documents constituted an unruly collection of competing interests and artistic agendas—an apt portrait of the movement they were to represent. Curiously, Baer did not invite any painters to participate in the project, perhaps suggesting an underlying ambivalence about painting’s status in the aesthetic terrain being forged by these artists. Indeed, Baer stands apart from Mangold and Novros, in that the issues with which she engaged in the sixties did not prove generative to a sustained oeuvre. “I finished it,” she said of this body of work in a recent lecture. “I was becoming baroque and looking for ways to keep going . . . and I couldn’t find any that interested me. I was bored with it. I mean, I really had nothing more to do excepting I could trademark this stuff.”175 Elsewhere, she similarly described her growing sense that this body of work was verging on an exercise in marketoriented branding: “Once you have a brand, they don’t let you stop. That’s one of the reasons I left New York is I knew I had a brand. And I wanted to stop because I really wanted to go on and do other things.”176 In the same interview, she trivialized the later series’ embellishments of her original framing motif: “I was starting

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Figure 4.17 Jo Baer, Untitled (Wraparound Triptych—Blue, Green, Lavender), 1969–74, oil on canvas, three canvases, each 48 × 52 in. (122 × 132 cm). Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © Jo Baer.

to decorate, for God’s sake. There was nothing more to do for me. You know, I had already started investigating corners of things. I mean . . .”177 Described in this light, the frame band paintings appear to have been a closed statement, one that had grown increasingly in danger of becoming mannered or cynical.178 When first conceived, these works asserted a specific identity for painting at a time of aesthetic shifts of a tectonic nature. Like her color bands’ chromatics, that identity was a function of extrinsic forces, burning brightly in one context only to fade with a shift in historical distance. Yet her paintings from the sixties resurface in exhibitions with far greater regularity than the early work of most other painters of this generation, suggesting their claims to both personal and painterly identity still retain a hold on our moment.179

Coda: Framing the Self(ie) Recent observation indicates this hold is intensifying. While Baer’s Minimalist paintings are commonly found in museum galleries, they have become a veritable phenomenon on social media networks, such as Instagram, where they serve as the unwitting backdrop for a uniquely 21st-century visual exercise in subjectivity formation: the

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Figure 4.18 Jo Baer (b. 1929), V. Eutopicus, ca. 1973, oil on canvas, 80 × 22 × 4 in. (203.2 × 55.9 × 10.2 cm). Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum. Photograph by Paul Macapia. © Jo Baer.

#artselfie. Centered before her paintings, viewers frame themselves in the act of simultaneous aesthetic consumption and social prosumption.180 In these images, Baer’s framing bands hypostatize the camera’s—or, to be more accurate, smartphone’s— framing of the self, thereby literalizing the selfie’s staging of subjectivity. In one such image that exemplifies this trend, a user captions his likeness: “2017 is a blank canvas, you’re the artist and subject.”181 This user imputes a literal and metaphorical blankness to Baer’s painting, so that it functions both as a background for a kind of readymade self-portraiture and as representation of the clean slate on which he will leave his mark in the coming year. Marvin Taylor’s inversion of the Duchampian axiom in relation to the #artselife is apt here: “Marcel Duchamp famously said that the observer completes the work of art; in the case of the #artselfie, the work of art completes the observer.”182 However, this sense of completion does not derive from the act of looking. With selfies, the illusion of self-presence is achieved not through the subject’s participation in a specular economy but rather through the digital economy of clicks, followers, likes, and shares. Of course, the central irony of the #artselfie is that the subject is never looking (or at least not closely) at the work of art. Were these viewers to attend to the complexity of the edges of Baer’s paintings rather than occupying their seemingly vacant centers, they might grasp the degree to which these

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works are at odds with the selfie’s constellating of identity into a sequence of discrete moments of self-staging. Baer’s color bands loom as a loose thread in these images, inviting the tug by which yet another fiction of selfhood comes unraveled.

Notes 1. On this point, I disagree with Viktoria Draganova, who depends on a narrow and monolithic understanding of Minimalism to argue that her paintings from the sixties had little truck with the movement. Viktoria Draganova, “Jo Baer’s Radical Figurations,” in In Terms of Painting, ed. Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2016), 276. 2. Jo Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer: Interview by Judith E. Stein, 2003,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres: Selected Writings and Interviews 1965–2010, ed. Roel Arkesteijn (Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2010), 24. 3. Jo Baer, “Dialogues with Artists, 1966–1967,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 85. 4. Baer titled the first section of her collected writings, “Minimalist Painter, 1960–1975” and regularly uses the term in her interviews. 5. Baer, “Dialogues with Artists, 1966–1967,” 85. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. The lone outlier is Edward Kienholz, who was most likely included due to their longstanding friendship dating back to the mid-fifties, when Baer lived in California. Her letter to Dan Flavin inviting him to participate makes no mention of Kienholz when it lists the other participants, which would suggest she also viewed him as peripheral to the project’s core concerns. Jo Baer, “Letter to Dan Flavin,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 86. 9. Baer, “Dialogues,” 85. 10. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 110. 11. In the interview in which Baer shares this quote, Judith Stein similarly views it as a gendered remark. Ibid. 12. Jo Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer, 2010 October 5–7,” interview conducted by Avis Berman, unpaginated transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 13. Ibid. 14. Hans Wallach, “Brightness Constancy and the Nature of Achromatic Colors,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 38, no. 3 (June 1948): 310–24. My understanding of this article was greatly enriched by Alan Gilchrist, Seeing Black and White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 81–2. 15. Alan Gilchrist asserts that this study had little to do with Gestalt psychology and was a “non sequitor” [sic] relative to his earlier training in Berlin. Gilchrist, 83–4. The fact that the single psychological study that had the most direct relevance to her mature artistic practice itself does not demonstrate Gestalt principles renders the claims regarding the influence of this branch of psychology on her art all the more spurious. 16. Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer.” 17. Ibid. 18. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 21. 19. There is some discrepancy on the Müller purchase. In her oral history interview with Avis Berman, she states that she bought one painting from Hansa, while in her interview with Judith Stein, she states that she bought two. 20. The creative side of their relationship was the subject of the exhibition Jo and Jack: Jo Baer and John Wesley in the Sixties (Matthew Marks Gallery, July 6–August 13, 2010) organized by Baer’s son, Josh Baer. 21. Baer has accused Wesley of predating one of his paintings so as to “make it look like he was ahead of [her].” Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer.” 22. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 15. 23. Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer.” 24. In her interview with Judith Stein, Baer described how she would publicly flout Beverly Hills etiquette, “I’d go to Elizabeth Arden with unshaved legs or armpits, for facials and

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26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

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haircuts and what not, being very bad. Hat, gloves, naked legs and everything unshaved. I really couldn’t stand being in Beverly Hills.” Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 21. Quoted in Swenson, 59. Originally appeared in David Weinrib, interview with James Meyer for Meyer’s, “Non, Nothing, Everything: Hesse’s ‘Abstraction,’” in Eva Hesse, ed. Elizabeth Sussman, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 76, note 52. Lucy R. Lippard, “Sexual Politics: Art Style,” reprinted in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1976), 31. Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer.” There is some discrepancy in the literature regarding the exact number of paintings in the Koreans series. In her oral history interview with Avis Berman, she says that she made 12. Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer.” The catalogue to her 2013 retrospective puts the number at 16. Jo Baer, Jo Baer, exh. cat. (Cologne: Museum Ludwig and Walther König, 2013), 74. However, her official website totals the series at 15. “Jo Baer,” www.jobaer.net. Similar descriptions of the Koreans are found in Jo Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Mark Godfrey, 2004,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 13 and Robert Pincus-Witten, “New York: Jo Baer,” Artforum 7, no. 6 (February 1969): 67. Although a handful of critics did review Baer’s gallery exhibitions in the sixties (several of which are cited in this chapter), the first monographic article about her work did not appear until Lucy Lippard published “Color at the Edge, Jo Baer” in Art News in 1972. Lippard began this article by addressing this critical neglect, suggesting that it was in part due to her gender: “It seems incredible that there has never been an article written on Jo Baer, that she has had only three one-woman shows since arriving in New York from California in 1960, that the only institutional recognition of her stature has been a National Endowment grant several years ago. Incredible because she certainly has one of the most impressive ‘underground’ reputations in New York among artists and those who listen to artists. . . . Why, then, is hers still an underground reputation? It is not just because she is a woman, and a woman who can take care of herself better than many men.” Lucy R. Lippard, “Color at the Edge: Jo Baer,” reprinted in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976): 172–4. Jo Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Mark Godfrey, 2004,” 27. Jo Baer, “Letter to Robert Morris, 1967,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 41. In their interview, Mark Godfrey observed: “In some respects, the mobile spectator that Morris was interested in is also the viewer of your painting,” a statement with which she agreed. Baer, “Interview with Mark Godfrey,” 33. Similarly, Patricia Kelly related Baer’s mode of spectatorship to Michael Fried’s notion of Minimalism’s “theatricality,” as well as to contemporaneous developments in dance and performance art: “In short, Baer’s canvases promised the disinterested spectator participatory engagement, a tactic associated as much with performative practices as with the theatricality of Minimal art.” Patricia Kelly, “Jo Baer, Modernism, and Painting on the Edge,” Art Journal 68, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 53. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 15. Kelly, 60. Leslie Tonkonow, “Radical Aesthetics: The Art of Jo Baer,” in Jo Baer: Paintings from the ’60s and Early ’70s, exh. cat. (New York: Paula Cooper Gallery, 1995), 1. To cite one more example of this understanding of Baer, Barbara Haskell related her work to a scientistic sixties zeitgeist, recasting the immanent materialism of Minimalist aesthetics as a benevolent empiricism: “The sixties were a period of optimistic faith in the intellect and reason. An enormous ebullience was generated by a feeling of certainty in facts and material progress. Truth was to be found in the rational, objective analysis of externals; emotional detachment was the era’s central value.” Barbara Haskell, Jo Baer, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1975), unpaginated. David Raskin relates Baer’s work to the sciences in a less reductive and more nuanced fashion in David Raskin, “Jo Baer and the Molecular Sublime,” in Jo Baer, ed. Julia Friedrich, exh. cat. (Cologne: Museum Ludwig and Walther König, 2013), 22–4. Jo Baer, “Art and Vision: Mach Bands, 1970,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 54–63. My understanding of Mach bands derives from Simon Ings, The Eye: A Natural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 201–3.

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38. I am indebted to Victoria Kazmerski for elucidating the optical science behind Baer’s paintings. 39. In their interview, Godfrey also notes that her research into optics postdated her first mature paintings. Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Mark Godfrey,” 33. Her interview with Linda Boersma also confirms this point. Jo Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Linda Boersma, 1995,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 157. 40. Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Linda Boersma, 1995,” 157. She made a similar point in her interview with Judith Stein, saying, “I did work with Gestalt psychology, but I wasn’t interested in it in the slightest. I was interested in something that’s there.” Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 15. These statements contradict David Elliott’s reading of Baer’s work, which suggests that she used her rectangular, symmetrical formats to create a legible gestalt or perceptual field. David Elliott, “Introduction,” in Jo Baer: Paintings 1962–1974, exh. cat. (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 7. 41. Lauren O’Neill-Butler has related Baer’s interest in The Unnamable to her strategies as a writer but does not delve into the novel’s influence on her paintings. Lauren O’NeillButler, “Going On,” in Jo Baer (2013), 18. 42. O’Neill-Butler comments on Beckett’s significance for Baer’s peers, such as Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, and Sol LeWitt. Ibid., 18. For a discussion of Minimalist aesthetics vis-à-vis Beckett’s literary style, see Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October 6 (Autumn 1978): 46–60. 43. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 134. 44. Ibid., 52. 45. Ibid., 179. 46. Wolfgang Iser, “Subjectivity as the Autogenous Cancellation of Its Own Manifestations,” in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 77. 47. Beckett scholars commonly cite Descartes as the author’s foil. For examples, see John Fletcher, “Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers,” Comparative Literature 17, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 43–56, and Sarah Gendron, “‘A Cogito for the Dissolved Self:’ Writing, Presence, and the Subject in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze,” Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 47–64. 48. Jacques Derrida used the tympanum is a figure of difference (or différance) in his preface to Margins of Philosophy. Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” reprinted in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 146– 71. Gendron also links this Beckett passage with Derrida. Gendron, 62. 49. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 14. 50. Mark Godfrey, “Programatics, Poetics, Painting: On Jo Baer,” in Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, no. 5, ed. Lynne Cooke and Stephen Hoban (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2014), 77. 51. Godfrey, 2. In her review of Baer’s 1966 Fischbach Gallery exhibition, Amy Goldin similarly remarked, “The brilliant black-and-white contrast immediately sends the eye to the frame, where it follows the line round and round, like a trapped animal on a treadmill.” Amy Goldin, “In the Galleries: Jo Baer,” Arts Magazine 40, no. 6 (April 1966): 69. 52. Iser, 81. 53. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 39. 54. David Bourdon, “Boxing Up Space,” Village Voice, February 24, 1966. 55. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 247–61 56. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window from Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 28. 57. Victor Stoichita coins the phrase “ontological cut” in Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Also quoted in Friedberg, 5. 58. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991). For a thorough exposition of Panofsky’s use of this term, see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 115–57.

Jo Baer 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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Panofsky, 67–8. Ibid., 66. Ibid. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), 16. Also quoted in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought (Oakland: University of California Press, 1993), 54. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 94. Also quoted in Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 7. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 130. Ibid., 48. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” reprinted in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 289. Ibid., 296, note 6. Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 5. For a critique of the historical grounds of this conflation, see Friedberg, 47. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 6. Hubert Damisch has advanced an important alternative reading of perspective that denies its role in affirming the transcendent self. Whereas the reading outlined in this chapter could be aligned with Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary—which, through the Mirror Stage, imparts the individual with an illusion of bodily coherence—Damisch sees perspective as more akin to Lacan’s Symbolic Order. In this reading, perspective functions like a language, which simultaneously interpellates and alienates the subject. Hubert Damisch, The Origins of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994). For a valuable gloss of the prevailing critical discourses surrounding the perspectival gaze, see Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville, Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 109–28. Bryson, 94. Taylor, Erring, 156–7. Emphasis in the original. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 266–7. Jo Baer, undated interview with Barbara Haskell, Jo Baer Artist File, Archives of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 59–60. Ibid., 61. Kasha Linville, “New York: Jo Baer, School of Visual Arts,” Artforum 9, no. 9 (May 1971): 77. Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Mark Godfrey,” 28. Lucy R. Lippard, “New York Letter: Off Color,” Art International 10, no. 4 (April 1966): 73. Ibid. Ibid. Jo Baer, “A Telephone Interview by Brian White Evans,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 171. Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Mark Godfrey, 2004,” 28. Mark Godfrey has similarly interpreted these works, writing that “what counted . . . [was] the extraordinary difference between identical units that emerges in the viewing process alone.” Godfrey, 14. Jo Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Mark Godfrey, 2004,” 33. Quoted in Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, 23. When asked why this group included red, which is not listed as one of the four colors in the series, Baer answered that she felt the magenta could function as a red or purple. Baer, email to the author, April 9, 2013. Mel Bochner, “Systemic Painting,” 15. For more on Bochner and seriality, see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 172–83 and Rich, “Seriality and Difference,” 109–15. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 178.

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90. Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,” reprinted in Solar Systems and Rest Rooms, 22. 91. Ibid., 22–3. 92. As Baer explained in a recent email, these selective proscriptions were not so much the product of artistic intuition as traditionally understood, but rather were determined by whether or not a specific configuration achieved her desired chromatic effect. “[I]t was not so much subjective as being ‘correct’. There are only a few shades/tones, etc. that will work in any of these prescribed formats. It was try and see, rather than like or not like.” Jo Baer, email to the author, April 9, 2013. 93. Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism,” reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, 99. 94. Al Brunelle, “Review and Previews: Jo Baer, David Budd, and Peter Young,” Art News 66, no. 9 (January 1968): 11. 95. For another view of the relationship between Bochner and Baer, see Godfrey, 81–4. 96. Jo Baer, email to the author, October 29, 2012. In a recent conversation, Ashton stated that while she was involved in the essay’s publication, she did not remember choosing its illustrations or the rationale that went into their selection. Dore Ashton, conversation with the author, May 12, 2013. 97. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 12. 98. Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1982), 191. 99. Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 7 (May 1967), 26. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 29. 103. Ibid., 31. 104. Though she does not discuss the Marcuse article, Courtney J. Martin also discusses this double meaning that Alloway’s “systemic” would have possessed to sixties viewers. Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s Systems,” 101. My reading of Baer’s inclusion in this article differs from Julia Bryan-Wilson’s. Though she acknowledges that Baer’s painting may have been included to represent “the blank face of the one-dimensional society,” she deems it more likely that it stood for “minimalism, productively understood here as an art that diagnoses the flatness of contemporary society and proposes a new aesthetic that would move beyond this flatness.” Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 64. 105. Bryan-Wilson has suggested that Gregory Battcock, who was also an Arts editor and later applied Marcuse’s writings to Minimalist art, may have been responsible for the illustration of Marcuse’s article. However, the consonance between Ashton’s review of Systemic Painting and the Marcuse article’s invocation of the exhibition leads me to believe that she was most likely was responsible for its images. Bryan-Wilson, 65. 106. Timothy J. Lukes, The Flight into Inwardness: An Exposition and Critique of Herbert Marcuse’s Theory of Liberative Aesthetics (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1985), 95. 107. Baer, “Art and Politics, 1970,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 53. For more on Baer’s political engagements, see Kelly, 63–5. 108. For a related account of the politics of Donald Judd’s art, see David Raskin, “Specific Opposition: Judd’s Art and Politics,” Art History 24 (November 2001): 682–706. Baer’s convictions about the political potential of her Minimalist work changed later in life. In her recent oral history interview, she described her dismay at learning that her work had been lent as part of the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program. Unlike her Minimalist paintings, she felt her later figurative work resisted this type of political instrumentalization: “I actually was horrified when I first came to England to learn that the CIA had been taking my paintings from the Museum of Modern Art. They had a program where they placed them in embassies . . . in Eastern Europe. And they had a painting of mine in Hungary that was professed to show that Americans had the freedom to do anything, even blank canvases. So I . . . felt . . . that if I cannot include something rude enough to move these people away from me—I don’t care if it’s [Charles] Saatchi, or Exxon, or

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109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

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whoever—then I’m not doing my job. So from that day, from then on, particularly in this image work, you will see me being deliberately rude and that’s why. I don’t like to be coopted.” Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer.” For a discussion of other Marcusean critiques of Minimalism during its ascent, see Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 250–51 and 262–65. For a more recent argument linking Minimalist art and the politics of domination, see Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 (January 1990): 44–63. Peter Schjeldahl, “Through the Frame (The Frame Is through),” in Ralph Humphrey: Frame Paintings: 1964 to 1965, exh. cat. (New York: Mary Boone Gallery, 1990), unpaginated. Ibid. Ibid. For a more thorough description of this work, to which my own is indebted, see Donald Kuspit, “Jules Olitski,” in The Shape of Color: Excursions in Colour Field Art 1950–2005, ed. David Moos, exh. cat. (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2005), 64. As Fried has noted, an interest shape in shape can be found in his earliest critical writings, though by 1966, it had taken on new significance. For his reflections on this term and its role in his criticism, see Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood, 23–7. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 153. Ibid., 151. Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” 77. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 151. Fried, “Shape as Form,” 84. Ibid., 84–5. “To begin with, the partial internal ‘frame’ amounts to something like depicted shape; and this in itself means that the quality of individual paintings no longer solely depends on the almost unanalyzable relation between the sprayed canvas and the shape of the support that apparently governs the success or failure of the early spray paintings.” Ibid., 86. Ibid. Michael Fried, “Jules Olitski,” in Art and Objecthood, 143–4. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 168. Godfrey, 75. Haskell, unpaginated. Jo Baer, “Letter to Marilyn Fischbach and Donald Droll, 1966,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 37. Jo Baer, “Art & Vision: Mach Bands,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 59. Also relevant in this regard is her 1967 letter to Michael Fried, in which she writes, “One good reason to work in painting is that it is already conventionalized as ‘art,’ and there is no further need to differentiate it from ‘objects.’ If to give full attention to the formal means and content of painting, within and beyond its history, defines the painting as ‘modernist,’ I accept the designation for myself.” Jo Baer, “Letter to Michael Fried, 1967,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 40. Kelly, 53. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 24. Baer recounts similar versions of this anecdote in Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Mark Godfrey, 2004,” 28 and Baer, “Traditional and Radical Painter: Excerpt from an Interview with Serge Guilbaut and Michael Sgan-Cohen, 1974,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 82. Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expresionism,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 130. Jo Baer, letter to Clement Greenberg, January 15, 1968, Jo Baer artist file, Whitney Museum of American Art Archives. Jo Baer, “Art & Vision: Mach Bands,” 54–63 and “On Seeing,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 51. See also Kelly, 58–61 and Godfrey, 86–8. Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 97. Greenberg, “The ‘Crisis’ of Abstract Art,” The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 181. Baer, “Traditional and Radical Painter,” 82. Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 80–1. James Meyer has discussed the philosophical underpinnings of “presentness,”

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140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155.

156. 157. 158.

159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

Jo Baer distinguishing it from Greenbergian “self-presence.” Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 234–43. Baer, “Letter to Robert Morris, 1967,” 41. Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting,” in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 560–80. Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 116–51. Also pertinent is James Meyer’s account of how Greenberg read femininity into the art of Anne Truitt. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 222–8. Baer, “Art and Politics, 1970,” 53. Another Baer remark also captures the encoded sexuality of Color Field Painting: “All the ‘Greenberg people’ think that they are ‘Swingers.’ They are hedonists who indulge in color.” Baer, “Traditional and Radical Painter,” 82. “It would seem the only way to conceptualize and control these slippages between categories of gender [in modernist paintings] was to somehow redeem them by incorporating them back into traditional narratives of artistic mastery.” Saltzman, 567. Brennan, 118. Brennan titles her chapter on this subject, “How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender.” Ibid., 116. Ibid., 139. For a discussion of how critics inscribed gender into Frankenthaler’s work, see Brennan, 125–34 and Saltzman, 562–6. Quoted in Brennan, 146–7. Jo Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Linda Boersma, 1995,” 158. Jo Baer, “Untitled Statement: American Woman Artist, 1971,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 70. Ibid. Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Linda Boersma, 1995,” 157. Judith Stein, Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016), 235–6. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 23. Baer, “Jo Baer Interviewed by Linda Boersma, 1995,” 157. Brennan also discusses the Cartesian foundations of modernist critical discourse: “Yet this artistic project is inherently fragmented owing to its own rhetorical emphases on opticality and disembodiment. These themes essentially represent a late modernist repackaging of Cartesian dualism, as critics repeatedly identified a subject who was at once ideally unified and visually engaged yet curiously detached from his own body.” Brennan, 150. I interpret this issue differently from Patricia Kelly, who characterizes Baer’s emphasis on the embodied spectator as an assertion of an identity that was both feminine and feminist, relating it to her associations with female experimental dancers, such as Yvonne Rainer. This interpretation does not account for either Baer’s reluctance to identify with feminism or the ways in which the works themselves resist gender coding. Kelly, 62. Baer, unpublished interview with Haskell, 6. Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 24. Ibid. Hostilities between Baer and the Minimalists persisted well beyond the sixties. In her 2010 oral history interview, she recounted how Carl Andre chastised her for attending his 1987 exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Baer, “Oral History Interview with Jo Baer.” Jo Baer, “Letter to the Editor, Artforum, 1967,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 42. Ibid. Jo Baer, “Letter to Robert Morris, 1967,” in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 41. Baer, “Letter to the Editor, Artforum, 1967,” 42. Baer, “Letter to Michael Fried, 1967,” 40. Baer, “Letter to Robert Morris, 1967,” 42. Baer, “Letter to the Editor, Artforum, 1967,” 43. Ibid. Baer, “Letter to Robert Morris, 1967,” 42.

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168. Godfrey makes a similar point, writing, “[Baer’s] attack on Flavin . . . predicts Hal Foster’s analysis of Minimalism: she saw just how his version of the readymade was every bit as tied to contemporary industrial production as was Pop.” Godfrey, 9. 169. Baer, “Letter to the Editor, Artforum, 1967,” 87–8. 170. “It is, I believe, that emphasis on shape that accounts for the impression, which numerous critics have mentioned, that Judd’s and Morris’s pieces are hollow.” Emphasis in the original. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 151. 171. Baer, “Letter to Michael Fried, 1967,” 40. 172. Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4, no 9 (May 966): 24–6. 173. For an account of Baer’s figurative oeuvre, see Draganova, 270–86. 174. For Baer’s account of her withdrawal from abstraction and New York, see Baer, “I am No Longer an Abstract Artist, 1983,” reprinted in Broadsides & Belles Lettres, 111–12. See also Kelly, 65–7. For an incisive reading of the Wraparound and Radiator paintings, see Godfrey, 15–19. 175. Jo Baer, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture lecture, 2008, transcript, 42. 176. Baer, “Oral History Interview.” 177. Ibid. 178. Baer’s sense of this work’s exhaustion was also evident in her 1975 interview with Barbara Haskell, in which she expressed reservations that her recent paintings had verged on basrelief, which she described as “a minor art . . . [as] it avoids the difficulty of both painting and sculpture.” Baer, undated interview with Haskell, 16. 179. Recent exhibition include “Jo Baer: Gemälde und Zeichnungen seit 1960,” 2013, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; “Jo Baer: Paintings 1966–1980,” 2012, Gagosian Gallery, Geneva; “Jo and Jack: Jo Baer and John Wesley in the Sixties,” 2010, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2010; “Jo Baer: The Minimalist Years 1960–1975,” 2002, Dia Center for the Arts, New York. Baer herself has commented on the vacillating interest in her work, saying, “Well, I’ll disappear again—being female, especially—but I’ll come back every fifteen years, because my work lasts.” Baer, “The Adventures of Jo Baer,” 13. 180. This characterization of the #artselfie derives from Marvin Taylor, “Introduction,” in #Artselfie, ed. Douglas Coupland and Simon Castets (Paris: Jean Boîte edition, 2014), 57. 181. Instagram account no longer publicly available. 182. Taylor, #Artselfie, 59.

5

Conclusion Against Endgames

The preceding chapters have sought to reintegrate painting into the history of Minimalism—to illuminate three painters’ substantive engagements with the issues that engendered and sustained the movement. Not only did their work share common ground with the more canonical practices of Judd, Andre, Flavin, Morris, et al., but these commonalities did not preclude commitments to issues and procedures specific to painting. A close reading of the early work of Mangold, Novros, and Baer militates against the notion that “Minimalist painting” represented a minor variant of sculptural Minimalism and reveals the practices denoted by the term to have manifested all the heterogeneity of the movement as a whole. Indeed, besides their shared choice of medium, the differences among these painters—in terms of training, formative influences, and aesthetic programs—far outweighed their similarities (and even within the general parameters of painting, they adopted a wide range of techniques, materials, and supports). And yet in some of our most influential critical accounts of abstract painting, this period appears surprisingly monolithic. To conclude, we will examine how Minimalist painting has been historicized in arguments made about the medium’s contemporary condition—with a particular focus on two essays, Yve-Alain Bois’s “Painting: The Task of Mourning” and Douglas Crimp’s “The End of Painting,” and two exhibitions, The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012) and Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (Museum Brandhorst, Munich, and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 2015–16)—and will consider how the art of Mangold, Novros, and Baer complicates their premises and conclusions. Bois and Crimp wrote their texts at a resurgent moment for painting, when NeoExpressionists such as Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente commanded the attention of both art institutions and a newly moneyed class of art collectors buoyed by a booming financial sector. Their essays thus must be understood as part of a broader lament from the critical establishment about art’s complicity in the neoliberal economics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.1 Neither Bois nor Crimp makes any mention of Mangold, Novros, or Baer, nor were they obligated to do so, for neither article purports to be a comprehensive history. But surely it should give one pause to find that they both take a single painter, Robert Ryman, as representative of advanced American abstract painting in the sixties.2 This characterization of Ryman as the ur-Minimalist painter persists to the present day, as seen in a recent roundtable discussion about contemporary abstract painting, in which James Meyer describes certain contemporary artists’ emphasis on painterly process as “entirely consistent

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3

with Minimalist painting, if by Minimalism you mean Robert Ryman.” That both Bois and Crimp settle upon the same artist in the construction of their critical models suggests that Ryman’s oeuvre (or at least a particular portion of it) lends itself to a teleological mode of argumentation in a way that other painting practices of this period do not. In his more than six-decade commitment to exploring the material and procedural possibilities of white monochrome painting—its brushes, pigments, binders, supports, and facture—these critics see a knowing enactment of modernist painting’s self-reflexive endgame, though each reads this position somewhat differently.4 As will be seen, the version of Ryman historicized in these texts has been contested by the artist’s more recent commentators and the artist himself, making his status as the period’s standard-bearing painter all the more vexed. In Bois’s argument, modernist teleology verges on eschatology, with Ryman serving as “the guardian of the tomb of modernist painting.”5 Elsewhere, he identifies the artist as “the last modernist painter,” in that his work is at once the product of modernist discourse but also “undermine[s] it and exhaust[s] it through excess.”6 Underlying this argument is Bois’s belief that the entirety of abstract painting is predicated on an “apocalyptic myth.”7: One did not have to wait for the “last painting” of Ad Reinhardt to be aware that through its historicism (its linear conception of history) and through its essentialism (its idea that something like the essence of painting existed, veiled somehow, and waiting to be unmasked), the enterprise of abstract painting could not but understand its birth as calling for its end.8 According to Bois, Ryman endlessly defers Reinhardt’s telos by achieving a position of detached reflexivity, from which he wryly comments on painting’s eschatological dilemma: “I would say that Ryman has attempted to paint that he paints that he paints; that he has always wanted, by means of an excess of reflexivity, to outflank the tautological reflexiveness in which modernism has been locked.”9 Bois describes a Ryman who works “asymptotically” towards painting’s limiting conditions, creating objects that bear witness to those limits’ determinative function.10 In such a reading, a painting like Untitled (fig. 5.1) performs a kind of winking death dance composed of a single, repeated step. The parallel bands of paint continually announce the medium’s planar essence. Each drag of the brush progresses from a loaded to a discharged state in an endless performance of the exhaustion of the painterly gesture. And yet, this state of exhaustion is only as final as Ryman’s last painting, as each new work performs the dance anew. What for Bois is a telos deferred is for Crimp a fait accompli. The latter is much more explicit than the former in his disdain for the resurgence of Neo-Expressionist painting, which in his view operates in a state of willful amnesia, oblivious to the historical lessons of the art of the sixties: The rhetoric that accompanies this resurrection of painting is almost entirely reactionary: it reacts specifically against all those art practices of the 1960s and 1970s that abandoned painting and worked to reveal the ideological supports of painting as well as the ideology that painting, in turn, supports.11

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Figure 5.1 Robert Ryman (b. 1930), Untitled, 1965, oil on linen, 11 1/4 × 11 1/8 in. (28.6 × 28.3 cm). Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2018 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

This ideology of which he speaks is humanism—“the myth of man”—which he sees as an expired tradition whose chief relic in the visual arts was painting.12 In this view, to abandon painting for sculpture, as Judd, Morris, Flavin, and others had done, was to acknowledge humanism’s discredited status, and if one were to continue painting, one’s only viable option would be to lay bare the medium’s apodictic auto-extinction.13 Such is the task Crimp ascribes to Ryman: There is in [Ryman’s] language, as in his paintings, a strict adherence to the matter at hand. His conception of painting is reduced to the stark physical components of painting-as-object. The systematic, single-minded, persistent attempt to rid painting once and for all of its idealist trappings lends Ryman’s work its special place during the 1960s as, again, “just the last paintings anyone can make.”14 Both Bois and Crimp invoke Reinhardt’s notion of “last paintings,” but Crimp effectively conflates the older artist with Ryman, upholding the latter as a more complete

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realization of the former’s promise. In this view, Ryman’s works disenchant the medium, revealing painting to be nothing more than the obdurate matter of which it is composed. Returning to our previous example, such a view would take Untitled to be a literalist cataloguing of painting’s materials and procedures, divested of all claims to metaphor or metaphysics, to paraphrase Lynne Cooke’s definition of Minimalism quoted earlier.16 And how does Ryman understand his own practice? In his remarks about painting, he has distanced himself from the endgame scenarios of Bois and Crimp: Abstraction is a relatively recent approach to painting. I think abstract painting is just beginning. All possibilities are open to it in ways we can’t envision. I think painting is moving too slowly. I feel that the possibilities of painting are so great, and that we’ve just scratched the surface.17 More recent commentators on Ryman’s work have taken the artist at his word. Robert Storr, Suzanne Hudson, and Vittorio Colaizzi have all described Ryman’s practice as oriented more towards the broadening of painting’s prospects than the illustration of its diminished means.18 Though Hudson downplays the visual pleasure that factors prominently in Storr’s account, both characterize Ryman’s practice as a pragmatic testing of painting’s material possibilities, in which ultimate conclusions are perpetually deferred. Vittorio Colaizzi has described these investigations as being motivated by the productive tension between painting’s twinned capacities for aesthetic selfreferentiality and pictorial signification.19 Important differences exist among these writers’ understandings of Ryman, but they share enough to suggest that the critical consensus has moved beyond the endgames into which this artist’s practice was once shoehorned. If Ryman’s practice does not conform to the historicist models advanced in his name, what of Mangold, Novros, and Baer? Do we recognize anything of their practices in Bois’s and Crimp’s arguments? In part, the goal of this book has been to answer that question in the negative. Against the “apocalyptic myth” Bois takes as axiomatic for all abstract painting, these three artists, like Ryman, have viewed painting as a generative activity—generative not only of new technical possibilities for the medium but also of new cultural horizons with which it can engage. Contra Bois, these artists’ practices were neither essentialist nor historicist. In fact, all three artists were, in different ways, reacting against the constraints of received historicist dogma, and in doing so often corrupted the medium (by engaging mass culture and/or producing embodied modes of spectatorship), an effective denial of prevailing understandings of a medium-specific essence. And contra Crimp, these painters did not seek to expose the rhetoric of painting through a display of dumb literalism. To the contrary, all three painters retained an optical dimension to their work, creating paintings that mediated eye and body, image and object. Furthermore, their (non-Greenbergian) opticality was not an expression of an outmoded humanism but was rather applied towards critical investigations into areas that the purportedly more progressive practices Crimp supported also ventured: the dialectics of art and mass culture (Mangold), site specificity and the resistance to commodification (Novros), and the critique of subjectivity (Baer). Seen in this light, abstract painting of this period looks less insular, less detached from the pluralistic sweep of contemporary art.

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Admittedly, the moment that engendered Bois and Crimp’s polemics is different from our own. In the early decades of the 2000s, we are again witnessing a resurgence of painting and again critics lament its complicity in an art market bloated by unprecedented speculative excess. But where an earlier generation of painters were accused of blindness to history, today’s—we are told—are besotted with it. Walter Robinson coined the moniker “Zombie Formalism” to describe the wave of market-friendly, neo-Greenbergian abstract paintings he saw flooding galleries and art fairs.20 The Museum of Modern Art’s 2015 exhibition “The Forever Now” viewed this infatuation with history in more generous terms, describing contemporary painting as a permissive reconfiguration of the medium’s past for its digital present.21 While critics still bemoan painting’s status as the most eminently collectible art form, one that too easily functions as a vessel for the surplus liquidity of the 1%, it appears that today there is less interest in throwing the baby out with the bath water, as critics and curators have devised new genealogies for painting’s most recent reincarnation. However, in these accounts, Minimalist painting is conspicuous in its absence or, when mentioned, continues to be portrayed as a protracted swirl around the drain of the medium’s demise. Consider the following passage from Jeffrey Deitch’s catalogue introduction for the 2012 exhibition The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol: A painting tradition that was once seen as essentially reductive has now become expansive, bringing popular culture and current technology into its vocabulary. Abstraction has become more external and less internal. The practice of abstract painting has opened up to encompass not only its own history but the other great artistic innovations of the early twentieth century, including collage, the readymade, and the extension of art into performance. Once monolithic and doctrinaire, it is now more open and layered in its structure. Rather than reducing itself to a narrow definition of the medium, abstract painting has reemerged as an arena where opposing concepts can invigorate each other. The hybrid has replaced purity of form.22 Though Deitch does not explicitly mention Minimalism or the painters under discussion in these pages, one can safely assume that he would consider their practices to belong to the moribund stage in painting’s history that he claims to have been superseded. And while I do not invoke Deitch—an art dealer whose exhibition dated from his brief tenure as a museum director—as a critical thinker on the order of Bois and Crimp, I maintain that his exhibition (which had its origins in his time in the art market)23 is nonetheless symptomatic of a more widespread understanding of this chapter in painting’s history, as evidenced by the roster of distinguished art historians, critics, and curators who effectively ratify its premise with their contributions to its catalogue.24 The exhibition promotes a rejuvenated tradition of abstract painting under the banner of Andy Warhol, whom it posits as the emancipatory counterexample to other “monolithic and doctrinaire” contemporaneous practices. In the Pop artist’s application of printing technologies and appropriation of popular imagery in his late abstractions, the exhibition’s organizers saw a slackening of disciplinary constraints that made abstract painting more responsive to the breadth of contemporary culture, clearing a path for the urban, cartographic collages of

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Mark Bradford or the ironic home office expressionism of Wade Guyton’s ink jet paintings. The 2015–16 exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age attempted a more sophisticated and comprehensive reckoning with contemporary painting. Like The Painting Factory, this exhibition sets out to rethink the medium’s sixties inheritance but by invoking a more capacious historical framework, the Information Age. The curators—Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit—claim that in its assimilation of “‘alien’ objects, such as readymades, advertisement, film, video, and performance” into its procedures, painting today has become “interactive,” a development that they correlate with the rise of user-generated content that defined the transition to Web 2.0 in the early years of the 21st century.25 The intellectual spirit that presided over much of the exhibition was Joselit’s 2009 article, “Painting Beside Itself,” which has proven to be one of the more influential recent theorizations of contemporary painting. Joselit describes the “transitive” nature of much recent painting. Such works subject the art object to actions that visualize or otherwise enact painting’s status within cultural networks. “Transitive painting,” Joselit writes, “invents forms and structures whose purpose is to demonstrate that once an object enters a network, it can never be fully stilled, but only subjected to different material states and speeds of circulation.”26 He cites as examples of this phenomenon the work of Jutta Koether, in which a painted canvas might serve as a component of an installation or performance, and R.H. Quaytman, whose paintings often draw on the history of their sites of exhibition and are sequenced in “chapters” that endow her oeuvre with a self-conscious literary character. In these works, Joselit argues, painting exists “beside itself,” in an arch state of consciousness—not of the teleological drive towards its material essence, as Bois imputes to Ryman—but of the discursive, institutional, and technological conditions that frame its visibility. “Painting 2.0” featured an impressively diverse array of precursors from the sixties onward that prefigure the meta-medial strategies Joselit describes, including figurative and abstract painters from the United States and Europe.27 Minimalism, however, was entirely absent from the proceedings.28 Artists such as Mangold, Novros, and Baer presumably represent a version of painting that is too much within itself—too preoccupied with the specifics of the medium to allow for such extradisciplinary preoccupations.29 However, the preceding discussions of their practices demonstrate the degree to which these artists’ works chafed against conventional notions of medium specificity. This is not to deny that all three pursued concerns that were proper to painting, nor is it to reject medium specificity as a critical category. Indeed, recent critics have reaffirmed the value of the medium in discussions of painting, arguing that its relationship to the hand and individual agency gives it renewed urgency at a time when human experience is increasingly commodified, virtualized, or otherwise mediated.30 However, a close reading of the early work of Mangold, Novros, and Baer finds that they, too, belong to the genealogy of contemporary abstraction and enables one to locate the echoes of their work in the art of the present. Does one not see the affinities, for example, between Mangold’s willfully vulgar Yellow Wall and the orange shag carpet of Rudolf Stingel (fig. 5.2); or between Novros’s murals and Katherina Grosse’s site-specific, spray-painted installations

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Figure 5.2 Rudolf Stingel, Installation view, Daniel Newburg, New York, 1991. Courtesy of the artist.

(fig. 5.3); or between Baer’s diptychs and serial works and the metastatic proliferation of Allan McCollum’s Plaster Surrogates (fig. 5.4)? Stingel’s carpet installations carry forward Mangold’s use of banal decorator colors and his conflation of painting with architectural surface. The patterns left in their pile from viewer foot traffic yield all-over abstract compositions that share in his ironic engagements with Abstract Expressionism. Grosse explodes Novros’s concept of the “painted place” off the wall and into an expanded field of installation, wherein paint transforms the entirety of a site, from its architecture to the objects it contains. McCollum recasts Baer’s framed voids as vacuous aesthetic tokens, whose frames announce each as an interchangeable product in an economy of exchange in which commodification has colonized the once private domain of aesthetic delectation. Where her paintings emphasized the frame’s role in securing the ground of conscious perception, McCollum encodes it with the cultural forces that underwrite contemporary consciousness.

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Figure 5.3 Katharina Grosse, Untitled Trumpet, 2015, acrylic on wall and floor, and various objects, 260 × 826 13/16 × 511 13/16 in. (660 × 2100 × 1300 cm). Installation view: All the World’s Futures, 56th Art Biennale, La Biennale di Venezia. © Katharina Grosse und VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018. Courtesy of Gagosian. Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn.

Stingel, McCollum, and Grosse allow us to connect Mangold, Novros, and Baer to forms of painting that could be said to exist “beside” themselves. However, drawing such connections, in some respects, runs counter to the spirit of this book. One could say that its aim has been to illuminate painting’s capacity to operate outside, rather than beside, itself. It has argued that Mangold, Novros, and Baer possessed an equal stake as their sculptor peers in the issues that drove the formation of Minimalism’s discursive field: that Mangold, as much as Judd, Morris, and LeWitt, contributed to this period’s debates surrounding materiality, phenomenology, and seriality; that Novros was as committed to concepts of site specificity and permanent installation as Judd; that Baer’s paintings delegitimized the transcendent self as decisively as a Morris sculpture. In that spirit, I submit that the true test of these painters’ contestations of the “death of painting” critiques is the degree to which they articulate for the medium alternative discourses to art history’s cyclical fixation on death and rebirth.

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Figure 5.4 Allan McCollum (b. 1944), Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates, 1982 (cast and painted in 1984), enamel on cast Hydrostone, 40 panels overall ranging from 5 × 4 1/8 in. (12.8 × 10.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Robert and Meryl Meltzer and Robert F. and Anna Marie Shapiro Funds. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Notes 1. For an analysis of how these two essays fit into a larger wave of critiques of painting associated with the journal October, see Stephen Moonie, “October and the Ends of Painting,” in In Terms of Painting, ed. Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2016), 25–40. 2. Crimp does mention Frank Stella, though as a negative example, as when he says, “[I]t seems fairly clear that Stella’s own career is a prolonged agony over the incontestable implications of these works [the Black Paintings], as he has retreated further and further from them, repudiating them more vociferously with each series.” Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” in On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 99. The other painter who factors prominently into Crimp’s argument, Daniel Buren, emerged out of a markedly different historical context from American Minimalism. 3. Meyer does note, “There are various Minimalist painters [other than Ryman],” but he takes Ryman’s “phenomenology of making” to be emblematic of sixties painting practices, relating it back to Stella’s stripe paintings. Johanna Burton, et al., “The Painting Factory: A Roundtable Discussion,” in The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, ed. Jeffrey Deitch, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012), 9. 4. For an additional analysis of Ryman’s role in Bois and Crimp’s essays, see Vittorio Colaizzi, Introduction to Robert Ryman: Critical Texts since 1967, ed. Vittorio Colaizzi and Karsten Schubert (London: Ridinghouse, 2009), 14–17.

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5. Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 231. 6. Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” in Painting as Model, 225. 7. Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” 230. 8. Ibid. 9. Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” 224. 10. Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” 232. 11. Crimp, “The End of Painting,” 90. 12. Ibid., 92. 13. I adopt the term “auto-extinction” in this context from Storr, “Simple Gifts,” 37. 14. Crimp, “The End of Painting,” 94. 15. Robert Storr has made it clear that this is a problematic conflation. For an exposition of the salient differences between these two artists, see Storr, “Simple Gifts,” in Robert Ryman, 16 and 38–9. 16. It should be noted that Crimp’s attitude towards painting in this essay represents a significant departure from his earlier essay on abstract painting, “Opaque Surfaces” of 1973. In the earlier essay, he actually argues against the medium’s critics by delineating the characteristics of a painterly analogue to sculptural Minimalism. “The problem [for painting’s ongoing viability], then, was to achieve the painted equivalent of sculpture’s objecthood, i.e., surfaceness, if you will—to give the painted surface an equivalent literalness to that which Minimalism had imparted to the sculptural object. The specificity of a ‘specific surface’ is inherent in the quality of opacity, a quality that had been banished from painting when burnished gold surfaces gave way to pictorial spaces in the fourteenth century.” Under the rubric of “Opaque painting,” he describes a vibrant movement of radical painting, citing Ryman, Brice Marden, Mangold, and Novros as its chief practitioners and identifying key categories (format, size, scale, color, line, materials, and manner) that demonstrate their common concerns. However, as in “The End of Painting,” Crimp is selective in his examples, using only Marden and Ryman to illustrate this trend in any depth, and his insistence on a painting that is wholly literal and non-relational would have made it difficult for him to account for Mangold’s irregular drawn inscriptions or Novros’s multipanel paintings being produced at this time. At the end of the essay, one can sense seeds of doubt, as he wonders what the practices of artists like Dorothea Rockburne, Richard Tuttle, and other Conceptual artists might portend for the medium’s integrity. Douglas Crimp, “Opaque Surfaces,” reprinted in Meyer, Minimalism, 257–60. The preceding quote is found on page 258. 17. Quoted in Storr, “Simple Gifts,” 39. 18. “[Ryman’s] work hasn’t progressed so much as elaborated itself under the artist’s close watch. This occurs not only by means of ever more complex rearrangements of his signature devices, but by an ever-increasing number of similarly concise statements about what paint can do.” Storr, “Simple Gifts,” 10. “Ryman questions what a ‘painting’ is each and every time he makes a painting, and he saw—and sees—no reason why this experimentation cannot keep going. Ryman’s painting is precisely an experiment in keeping the experiment going.” Suzanne Hudson, “Robert Ryman’s Pragmatism,” October 119 (Winter 2007): 130. Storr’s characterization of Ryman as a “lyrical pragmatist” (Storr, “Simple Gifts,” 25) finds common cause with Hudson’s more comprehensive elucidation of his engagements with the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism in Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009). 19. Colaizzi, Robert Ryman, 283. 20. Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” Artspace, April 3, 2014. www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184. 21. Laura Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014). 22. Jeffrey Deitch, “Abstraction after Abstraction,” in The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol, ed. Jeffrey Deitch, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012), 5. 23. Jeffrey Deitch, “Acknowledgements,” in The Painting Factory, 238.

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24. The catalogue features essays by Rosalind Krauss, Francesco Bonami, Mark Godfrey, Jessica Morgan, and Wayne Koestenbaum, among others and begins with a roundtable discussion between Deitch, Johanna Burton, James Meyer, and Scott Rothkopf. 25. Manuela Ammer, et al., “Introduction,” in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, exh. cat. (Munich: Museum Brandhorst; Vienna: mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung, 2015), 11. 26. David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 132. 27. The curators state that while their exhibition invokes a 21st century metaphor, the condition it illuminates had its origins in the dawn of the Information Age. Ammer, et al., 10. 28. In his review of the exhibition, Jack Bankowsky also lamented Minimalism’s omission. Jack Bankowsky, “Review: Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age,” Artforum 54, no. 10 (Summer 2016): 385. 29. The Painting 2.0 curators explicitly set the artists included in their exhibition against “canonical investments in medium specificity.” Ammer, et al., 10. 30. David Joselit, for example, has described painting as a vast store of human time and affect. David Joselit, “Marking, Scoring, Storing, and Speculating (on Time),” in Painting beyond Itself, 11–20. And Isabelle Graw has characterized the medium as an accretion of human labor that imbues its objects with a subject-like presence. Isabelle Graw, “The Value of Liveliness: Painting as an Index of Agency in the New Economy,” in Painting beyond Itself, 79–101.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a plate on the corresponding page. #artselfie 175, 183n180 Abbott, Edwin A. 53–4 Abstract Expressionism 9, 12n27, 13, 17, 19, 25; Baer and 136, 164; endgames and 190; Mangold and 37–41, 50, 52, 68, 75; Novros and 89, 95, 98, 107 Adorno, Theodor 42, 81n38 Albers, Josef 37, 88 Albertian window 10, 143, 147 Alhambra, the 96, 96 Alloway, Lawrence 6, 9, 68, 93, 134, 154–5; and Baer 134; and the systemic 19, 180n104; and Systemic Painting 13–23, 25–30, 32n41, 32n48, 34n80, 34n87 Ammer, Manuela 189 Andre, Carl 4–5, 8, 30, 44, 63; and Baer 133, 151, 155, 172–73, 182n158, 184; and Novros 108, 113, 117 architecture 41–3, 48–50, 97–100, 110–12; prefabricated 68–74, 85n127, 160 Areas 9, 66, 82n63; 1/3 Gray-Green Curved Area 56, 56; Curved 58, 61, 83n86; and dialectics 49–51; Ellsworth Kelly and 82n61; and “Flat Art” 54, 56–8; Lippard and 77–9; Manila-Neutral Area 50, 81; Novros and 110; Storr on 82n68 Artforum 4, 8, 10, 58, 73, 113–14; Baer and 133, 155, 161, 165, 169–74 Art International 30, 57, 64 Art Research, Inc. 101–2 ARTNews 17, 51, 105–7 Arts Magazine 158, 160 Ashton, Dore 26–7, 157, 160, 180n96, 180n105 Baer, Jo 6–10, 135–9, 137, 150–1, 180n92, 181n128; and the Artforum letter 169–74; and Bauhaus 37, 139; and Beckett 141–9, 178n41; Bochner on 30–1, 154–6, 161; Bryan-Wilson on 180n104;

and color 179n86; and Color Field Painting 182n140; and criticism 177n30; “Dialogues” 133–4, 172; Double Column Series 172, 173; endgames and 184, 187, 189–91; and feminism 169, 182n155; and the Fischbach show 149–56, 150–2; and Flavin 133, 137, 139, 149, 155, 169–71, 183n168; and the frames of sixties painting 161–4; and Gestalt 135–6, 141, 176n15, 178n40; Godfrey on 143, 165, 178n39, 183n168; Haskell and 177n36, 183n178; Kelly on 141, 165, 182n155; and Kienholz 176n8; Koreans 134, 135, 139–41, 147–9, 171, 177n28; Minimalism of 133–5; and modernism 165–9; and the political 180–1n108; Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue 30, 79, 85, 154, 156–7, 158; Radiator paintings 172, 175; and the selfie 174–6; and spectatorship 177n33; and “the system” 156–61; Systemic Painting and 20, 30–1; Untitled (Vertical Flanking Diptych-Blue) 152; Untitled (White star) 137–9, 138; Wallach and 135–6, 141; Wraparounds 172, 174 Bannard, Walter Darby 73–4, 85–6n149 Barry, Robert 23, 159 Baudry, Jean-Louis 146 Batchelor, David 73–4, 79 Bauhaus 37, 139 Beckett, Samuel 10, 59, 140–9, 178n41–2 Bellamy, Richard 64, 77, 134, 136, 149, 161, 170 Biennale, Venice 33n74, 191 Bochner, Mel 8, 20–1, 29–31, 119–20, 124, 124n5; Art in Series 133, 155–6; Baer and 154–6, 161, 169, 172; and seriality 20, 155–6, 161; Working Drawings . . . 157 Bois, Yve-Alain 1, 10, 184–9 Bontecou, Lee 90, 94

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Index

Bourdon, David 66, 72; and Baer 144, 146, 150; and Novros 100, 103–4, 108, 113, 128n86, 128n91 Brennan, Marcia 167–8, 182n154 Bryson, Norman 145, 147 Calder, Alexander 136, 170 Canaday, John 65, 84n105, 84n108, 113, 119 Chamberlain, John 90, 94, 125n20 Chicago, Judy 168–9 CIA 180n108 Close, Chuck 37, 95 color 10; Baer and 134, 136–7, 174, 176, 179n86; Baer’s Artforum letter and 171–2; Baer and Beckett and 141–3, 147–8; Baer’s Fischbach show and 149–50, 152, 154–6; Baer’s Koreans and 139–40; Baer and the modernists and 168; chromophobia and 73–4; Color Field painting 89, 166–169, 182n140; decorator colors 69–74, 78, 86n152, 190; and the frames of sixties painting 161–5, Mangold and 36, 38–42, 44, 50, 54–5, 85–6n149; Novros and 93–4, 100, 102–3, 109–11, 115–18, 122–3; Sillman and 86n151; Systemic Painting and 13–14, 17, 21, 23, 28, 30 commodification 121, 187, 189 Conceptual art 40, 58, 60, 62–3, 133, 193n16 Cooke, Lynn 35–6, 187 Cooper, Paula 102, 127n63 Coplans, John 113–14, 117 Corbett, Edward 8 Crimp, Douglas 1, 10, 184–8, 192n2, 193n16 Crow, Thomas 78–9 Cubism 28, 79, 90 Dada 65, 73, 76, 139, 171 Deitch, Jeffrey 188 de Kooning, Willem 14, 37, 155 Derrida, Jacques 148, 178n48 Descartes 142, 146, 178n47; the Cartesian 142, 145–7, 169, 182n154; the postCartesian 10, 143 dialectics 35–9, 44–6, 50–1, 77–9, 163–5 di Suvero, Mark 101–2, 107, 128n76; and Novros 100 Downing, Thomas 23, 31n19 Doyle, Tom 139 Droll, Donald 133 Dwan, Virginia 101, 108–9, 115; see also Dwan Gallery; Dwan shows Dwan Gallery 12n27, 28, 61, 62, 133; David Novros exhibitions 108–16

Feeley, Paul 13, 18, 22, 32n48, 67 femininity 73, 137, 167–8, 182n139, 182n155 feminism 64, 168–9, 182n155 Ferus Gallery 126n45, 136–7, 169 Fischbach, Marilyn 133; see also Fischbach Gallery Fischbach Gallery 9, 57–8, 84; Baer and 133, 139, 144, 149–56, 178n51 Flavin, Dan 8, 117, 120, 124; Baer and 133, 137, 139, 149, 169–71, 183n168; endgames and 184, 186 Fleming, Dean 21, 23, 34n82, 101, 108, 127n66 Forakis, Peter 101, 108 frames 30, 107; Baer and 139, 146–8, 161–4, 178n51, 181n121; Derrida on 148; endgames and 190; Humphrey and 162; Olitski and 164 Frankenthaler, Helen 18, 90, 168 fresco 8, 10, 41; Great Age of Fresco exhibition 118–19; Judd and 126n40; Mexican muralists and 127n57; Novros and 82, 88, 93–4, 96, 118–24, 123; Winkler and 131n156 Fried, Michael 1, 5; Baer and 133, 143, 163–5, 167, 170, 172; Baer’s letter to 181n128; Friedian deductive structure 10, 165; Mangold and 38, 50–2, 64, 78; Novros and 110–11, 128n93; and shape 181n114; spectatorship and 177n33; Systemic Painting and 15, 17, 19, 22–3, 28 Friedberg, Anne 144 gender 10, 54, 133–4, 137, 165–9; and artistic mastery 182n141; and criticism 177n30; and feminism 182n155; see also femininity; masculinist, the Giotto 119, 122, 145 Glueck, Grace 108, 117, 119, 130n126 Godfrey, Mark 140, 143, 149, 165, 177n33, 178n39, 183n168 Gourfain, Peter 11n14, 22–3 Graham, Dan 71, 133, 172 Greenberg, Clement 1–2, 11n9, 14, 17–19, 21–3, 31n18, 187–8; Baer and 163, 165–70; Bennington and 82n67; Mangold and 43–5, 48–52, 54, 64, 68, 74–6, 78; Novros and 94, 97, 114, 121, 125–6n39; Rosenblum on 84n101 Green Gallery 3, 80n29, 112, 162 Grosse, Katharina 189–91; Untitled Trumpet 191 Grosvenor, Robert 101, 108; Transoxiana 48, 49 Guggenheim Museum see Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Index Hard Edge 23, 34n82, 89 Haskell, Barbara 147–8, 165, 177n36 Held, Al 13, 21–3, 22, 28, 37–8, 56 Hesse, Eva 37, 43, 81n43, 103, 117, 139, 155 Hochdörfer, Achim 189 Hopps, Walter 97, 126n52 Hudson, Suzanne 187, 193n18 Humphrey, Ralph 22, 77, 162–4; Wentworth 86 Huot, Robert 21, 34n82 Huxtable, Louise 70 illusionism 4–5, 9, 28–9; Baer and 143, 166–7, 171–2; Mangold and 45–6; Novros and 88–9, 90, 94, 97 Information Age 189, 194n27 Insley, Will F. 15, 22–3, 41, 81n33; Wall at Dawn 22, 23 Iser, Wolfgang 142–4, 146 Jensen, Alfred 41, 91–2; Mayan Temple, Per II: Palenque 92 Jewish Museum 4, 80n31, 94; Primary Structures 9, 15–16, 25, 30, 82n61, 108 John Daniels Gallery 55, 55, 61 Johns, Jasper 41, 67, 137, 139, 155 Joselit, David 189, 194n30 Judd, Donald 1–2, 2, 4–5, 8, 10, 125n20; Baer and 133, 137, 139, 151, 155–6, 165, 169–72; Bochner on 124n5; criticism and 89-95; endgames and 184, 186, 191; on fresco 126n40; Mangold and 39, 44, 48, 54, 63, 71, 75–6; Meyer on 124n7; Novros and 88–95, 97–8, 108, 110–11, 113–17, 120–4; Systemic Painting and 13–14, 16, 29–30; Untitled 91; see also “Specific Objects” Kantor, Paul 136 Karp, Ivan 134, 149, 161 Kay, Jane H. 25–7, 65 Kelly, Ellsworth 18, 23, 48, 92n61 Kelly, Patricia 141, 165, 177n33, 182n155 Kienholz, Ed 136, 160, 176n8 Klarwein, Mathias 158, 159–60 Koether, Jutta 189 Kohn, Adrian 89–90 Kramer, Hilton 25–7, 65 Krauss, Rosalind 28–9, 34n80, 59, 64, 78, 89, 147, 172 Kröller-Müller Museum 138 Krushenick, Nicholas 15, 31n19; Tel Aviv Hippy 23–4, 24 Kubler, George 53, 83n76 Leo Castelli Gallery 2, 5, 28, 125n24, 134, 170 Levittown, NY 69–70

197

LeWitt, Sol 8–9, 30; Baer and 133–4, 155–6, 172; Hesse and 81n43; Mangold and 48, 51, 55–63, 62, 67; Novros and 103, 108; Serial Project, I 61; Swenson on 83n82 Lippard, Lucy 6, 9, 28–30, 38, 40, 50; and Baer 139, 149–50, 161, 177n30; on Canaday 84n108; and Greenberg 50, 54, 64–5, 68, 74–6, 78; and Mangold 54, 63–5, 67–9, 71–2, 74–8, 84n121; and Novros 103, 108, 115; on Stella 34n81 literalism 5–6, 8–10, 11–12n20, 20–1, 29–30; Baer and 113–14, 162–3, 170–1; Mangold and 35–6, 48–50, 75–6; Novros and 92–3 Los Angeles 95, 108–9, 115–16, 121, 128n86, 136, 169 Los Angeles County Museum of Art 14, 21, 173 Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art 12n25, 153, 184 Los Angeles Times 113 Louis, Morris 77, 168 Lukin, Sven 31n7, 68 Magar, Anthony 101, 104, 105 Mandelman, Beatrice 8 Mangold, Robert 6–8, 10, 59–60, 67, 70, 73; Baer and 133–4, 140, 156, 173; Brown Corner 42–4, 42, 46, 48, 81n38; and colors 85–6n149; Cooke on 79n3; Crimp and 193n16; and dialectics 35–6, 38–40, 45; endgames and 184, 187, 190–91; “Flat Art” 9, 51–4, 56–8, 62–3; Gray-Green Quarter Circle 56–7, 57; LeWitt and 55–63, 83n81; Lippard and 75–76, 84n121; and Newman 81n34; Novros and 93, 95, 97, 103, 113; Princenthal on 86n152; Storr on 40, 80n13, 81n41, 82n68; Systemic Painting and 13, 20, 22, 28, 30; Thibaut Gallery show 37, 81n39; Untitled (Pale Red) 80; V Series Central Diagonal 2 (Green) 60; Walls and Areas 64–6, 69, 71–2, 74, 77, 161; WVX Series 59; see also Areas; Walls Mangold, Sylvia Plimack 37 Marcuse, Herbert 157–61, 158, 160, 180n105 Marden, Brice 6, 8, 37, 95, 123, 193n16 Martin, Agnes 8, 12n27, 22 Martin, Courtney J. 18, 180n104 materialism 1, 5, 44, 76, 170, 177n36 Matisse, Henri 136; Apollo 98–99, 99 McCollum, Allan 190–1; Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates 192 Medium hybridity 1, 14, 41, 55, 81n43, 92–3, 188

198

Index

medium specificity 1, 11n9, 76, 165, 189, 194n29 Melcher, Tamara 101, 104, 106 Mellow, James 57, 115, 117, 119 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 112 Meyer, James 4–9, 13, 25; and Baer 133, 155; on the East and West Coasts 12n31; on Fried 11n12; and Judd 88–9, 92, 124n7; and Mangold 38, 61, 65–6; on Morris 11n9; on Ryman 88–9, 184–5, 192n3; on Wollheim 84n102 Mills, C. Wright 26 modernism 1–2, 5, 9–10; Baer and 162–3, 165–9, 181n128; Cartesian foundations of 182n154; and endgames 185; Fried on 128n93; gender and 182n141; Krauss on 34n80; Mangold and 63, 65–6, 68, 72–9; Novros and 89, 91, 94–5, 113, 115; Systemic Painting and 15, 19–21, 26, 28, 30–1 Mogensen, Paul 6, 109, 115, 123 Monte, Jim 133 Morris, Robert 1–4, 3, 8, 30, 184, 186, 191; and Baer 133–4, 140, 165, 167, 170–1; Fried on 183n170; and the Green Gallery 80n29; and Kubler 83n76; and Mangold 41, 51–4, 66–7, 77; Meyer on 11n9; “Notes on Sculpture” 2–4, 51–3, 170; and Novros 93, 108, 112–13, 117 murals 10, 93–9, 114, 118–19, 130, 131n156; destruction of 121–2, 131n156; portable 41, 94, 98, 127n57 Museum of Modern Art 38, 121; “16 Americans” 126n55; Baer and 180n108; “The Forever Now” 188; Novros and 127n57; The Responsive Eye 15 Myers, Forrest 100, 102, 104–5, 105, 108 Neo-Dada 67, 75 Newman, Barnett 18–20, 166; and Mangold 38–9, 41, 44–5, 66–7, 78–9, 81n34; and Novros 88, 97–8; Onement IV 45 New School of Social Research 135–6, 140–1 New York City 8–10, 17, 21, 26–7; Baer and 133–7, 169–70, 172–3, 177n30; Mangold and 35, 37–9, 42–3, 55–6, 64, 71; Novros and 88, 97–8, 108, 117–18; see also New York School New York School 14, 19, 26; Mangold and 37, 40, 52; Novros and 90, 95 New York Times 25, 27, 65, 70, 85n127, 119 New York University 115 Noland, Kenneth 10, 13, 18, 22, 29–30; Baer and 163–4, 166–9; Fried on 110–11; Judd on 94–5; Mangold and 51 Novros, David 6–10, 13, 28, 31, 41, 107; 2:16 100, 102, 116; 4:32 100, 103; 4:24 100, 104; 6:30 110, 83; VI:XXXII 111;

art historical merits of 125n13; and Baer 133–5, 140, 173; Crimp on 193n16; and di Suvero 100; and the Dwan shows 108–16; and endgames 184, 187, 189–91; the fiberglass paintings 116–18; and fresco 118–24, 126n40, 131n156, 132n166; and the gallery system 131n157; Glueck on 130n126; and Judd 88–95; on the LA art scene 126n45; and letters to family 101, 130n133, 130n134; and the Mexican muralists 127n57; on his modular work 126–7n56; and the “painted place” 95–8; at Park Place Gallery 98–108, 128n76, 128n86, 128n91; on Rothko 126n44; and titles 127n59; Untitled (1969) 84; Untitled (1970) 82; Untitled (1977) 123 Novros, Esther 126n41 Novros, Lester 101, 112, 126n41 objecthood 1–2, 16, 20, 29; Baer and 163–4, 172; Crimp on 193n16; Mangold and 41, 67, 79; Novros and 113–14, 117 O’Keeffe, Georgia 8 Oldenburg, Claes 90, 94 Olitski, Jules 18, 50, 162–4; Patutsky in Paradise 86, 163 Op art 15, 40, 75, 89, 108 opticality 1–5, 8–10, 15–17, 22, 28, 30, 187; Baer and 136, 140–3, 154, 163, 166, 172; and Cartesian dualism 182n154; Mangold and 38, 43–6, 49–51, 58, 76–8; Novros and 92, 94, 97, 111, 113–14; optical transcendence 1, 45 optical science 10, 141, 178 “painted place” 93, 95–8, 112, 190 Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age 10, 184, 189, 194n29 Park Place Gallery 23, 48, 98–108, 100, 110–11, 116 Pavia, Phillip 51–2 phenomenology 3–4, 8, 191; Baer and 140; Mangold and 48–9, 51; Novros and 112, 124; Ryman and 192n3 Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA): A Romantic Minimalism 4–5, 5 pictorial, the: Baer and 140, 146, 151, 162–4, 170; and the embodied 128n76; Mangold and 45; Novros and 104 Pincus-Witten, Robert 28–9, 117 Pollock, Jackson 17, 20, 37, 41; Judd on 125n20; Novros and 88, 90, 98, 114 polychromy 5, 116–17, 123 Poons, Larry 13, 15, 18, 22; Mangold and 77; Novros and 98, 108, 115, 124n7 Pop art 23, 188; Baer and 137; Mangold and 39–40, 67–8, 70, 72, 75

Index Princenthal, Nancy 51, 86n152 Prokopoff, Stephen S. 4, 11n16 Quaytman, R.H. 189 Rauschenberg, Robert 67, 94; Factum I and II 152–3, 153 Reinhardt, Ad 8, 22, 65–7, 88, 108–9, 122; Canaday on 84n105; and endgames 185–6 Rich, Sarah K. 19, 32n32, 73 Robins, Corinne 104–5, 107–8, 128n91 Rosenberg, Harold 19, 32n41, 68, 107 Rosenberger, Christina Bryan 8 Rothko, Mark 194; Baer and 162, 166; Mangold and 37–9, 41, 50–1, 66–7, 78–9; Novros and 122, 126n44 Rothko Chapel 121 Ruda, Edwin 13, 23, 67; Park Place Gallery and 101, 104, 106–8, 106 Ryman, Robert 6, 8, 10, 12n29, 88–9, 103, 193n18; Allied 22; Crimp on 193n16; and endgames 184–7, 189; and a phenomenology of making 192n3; Systemic Painting and 21, 28; Untitled 185–7, 186 Safdie, Moshe 160 Schjeldahl, Peter 33n56, 162 sculpture 1–5, 9, 14–16, 20–1, 29, 186, 191; Baer and 147, 156, 163, 166, 170–3; Mangold and 39–41, 46–8; Greenberg’s theory of 11n9; Lippard and 75–6; Magar with 105; Mangold and 51–6, 58, 61, 65, 67, 71; Myers with 105; Novros and 88–9, 93, 108, 112, 114, 117, 120; at Park Place Gallery 104 Seldis, Henry 113 self, the see self-criticality; subjectivity selfies 174–6 Sillman, Amy 86n151 Smith, Roberta 93, 125n33 Smithson, Robert 30, 48, 71; Baer and 133–4, 172; Park Place Gallery and 103, 108 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 6, 93, 134, 158; see also Systemic Painting “Specific Objects” 1, 14, 89, 92–3, 125n33; and Baer 170; and Mangold 41, 51, 67, 80n32 Spohn, Clay 8 Stein, Gertrude 51–2 Stella, Frank 4–8, 13, 16, 18, 20–3, 27–30; and Baer 149, 163–5; Crimp on 192n2; Irregular Polygons 4–5, 7, 8, 21, 28–9, 93; Leider on 11–12n20; Lippard on 34n81, 34n85; and Mangold 35–6, 40–1, 51,

199

66–7; Moultonville III 7; and Novros 88, 91–4, 97–8, 108, 111, 113–15, 124; stripe paintings 4–6, 6, 28–30, 92, 98, 149, 164; Union Pacific 6 Still, Clyfford 37, 95, 136 Stingel, Rudolf 189–91, 190 Storr, Robert 40, 80n13, 81n41, 82n68, 187, 193n18 subjectivity 10, 112; Baer and 141–9, 162, 165, 168–9, 174–5, 187 sublation 78–9, 163 Swenson, Kirsten 83n82, 83n83, 83n84, 139 systemic, the 73, 108, 134, 180n104; “the system” 156–61; see also Systemic Painting Systemic Painting 4, 9, 13–17, 14–16; Baer and 154–6, 160–1; critical response to 25–31; the installation of 21–5, 22–4; Mangold and 35, 41; Novros and 100, 108; and “systemic” defined 17–21 Taylor, Mark C. 145–7 transcendence 30, 50, 111–12; optical 1, 45; transcendent self 179n70, 191 Tuchman, Maurice 20, 33n50 University of Texas Health Science Center 123 Valledor, Leo 101 Van Buren, Richard 4, 48 Village Voice 66, 150–1, 151 Wallach, Hans 135–36, 141 Walls 9, 66, 68–9; Baer and 139; and dialectics 41–4, 48–51; “Flat Art” 54–5, 57; Gray window wall 46–7, 47; Hesse and 81n43; Red Wall 44, 46–8, 64, 80; Storr on 81n41; and sublation 78–9; the Thibaut Gallery show and 81n39; Yellow Wall 46, 49, 81, 189 Warhol, Andy 40, 119, 188 Wesley, John 88, 124n9, 137–9, 169; Bird Girl 138 Wesselman, Tom 40, 67 Whitney Museum of American Art 12n29,133, 165, 172 Whyte, Jr., William H. 70–1 Williams, Neil 27, 67; Sartorial Habits of Billy Bo 23–4, 24 Wollheim, Richard 65–6, 75, 84n102, 134 Youngerman, Jack 21, 23, 33n66, 91 Yunkers, Adja 8 Zox, Larry 21, 23