Carl Andre, Sculptor Who Pioneered Minimalism, Dies at 88

Carl Andre, a sculptor who was among the foremost artists associated with the Minimalist art movement of the 1960s, died on Wednesday at 88. His death was confirmed by Paula Cooper Gallery, his longtime New York representative.

“Carl Andre redefined the parameters of sculpture and poetry through his use of unaltered industrial materials and innovative approach to language,” the gallery wrote in its announcement. “He created over two thousand sculptures and an equal number of poems throughout his almost seventy-year career, guided by a commitment to pure matter in lucid geometric arrangements.”

Andre was among the Minimalists who stripped sculpture to its bare essentials, paring the medium down until it existed simply as forms made from industrial materials that were not intended to evoke any emotions. He received praise for his art of the 1960s and ’70s, only to face scrutiny during the late ’80s when he faced trial for the death of his partner, the artist Ana Mendieta.

In 1988, Andre, who was accused of murdering Mendieta, was acquitted after a bench trial. Yet many have continued to put forward theories about Mendieta’s death that implicate Andre, with curator Helen Molesworth doing a podcast about the subject last year.

These allegations have not kept Andre’s work from being exhibited widely in museums. His “Elements” series, featuring sculptures formed from uniformly sized red cedar blocks arranged in various ways, are still considered hallmarks of Minimalism, as are his “Plains” and “Squares” sculptures, crafted from steel and aluminum plates and magnesium, respectively.

The Dia Art Foundation organized an Andre retrospective in 2014; it went on to travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. An exhibition of his work was recently on view at the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea.

Andre himself once said that his work is “close to zero,” in that it was non-representational and deliberately devoid of affect. He, alongside other members of the Minimalist movement, was essential in bringing art in an increasingly conceptual direction—away from the visual, into the realm of ideas.

But Andre’s work, unlike that of other Minimalists like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, was hard, steely, and severe. Critic Peter Schjeldahl once put it bluntly in a review of one Andre show: “Andre is not much fun.” That Andre rarely gave interviews on the record—both during his rise to fame in New York and after it, in the later stages of his career—seemed only to reinforce the idea of a flinty thinker whose art mirrored his psyche.

Many of his sculptures feature objects arrayed according to rigorous rubrics that allowed for little room for variation. His “Equivalent” series, begun in 1966, is a grouping of rectangular arrangements of firebricks. Each element has the same exact size, shape, and weight; they appear factory-produced, as though Andre had never touched them.

Their industrial look and feel was in some ways the point. Art historians have drawn parallels between Andre’s sculptures and Constructivism, the Russian avant-garde movement of the 1910s that saw no division between art and labor. And more generally, scholars have theorized quite a bit about Andre’s use of space and form. But Andre, for his part, once said of all that writing, “I thought that was nothing but bullshit.”

Adding to the unadorned appearance of these works is their unusual presentation style. They are exhibited on the floor, without a pedestal to uphold them as had historically been the case for a sculpture or an art object of note. In Andre’s hands, these firebricks constituted something that ought not to be worshipped, as most art objects might: viewers could walk on them, trodding over these sculptures as though they were just another part of their art spaces’ architecture.

But for many, these objects have been tough to admire after the death of Mendieta, the Cuban-born artist who fell from a window in 1985. Critic Calvin Tomkins, in a lengthy profile of Andre published in the New Yorker in 2011, wrote, “It is hard to think of an artist whose career has been so affected by circumstances that have nothing to do with his art.”

A full obituary will follow.