Space age sculpture12/23/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() 6Īl Held, one of Bartlett’s painting instructors at Yale, was included the show, as was Bartlett’s friend Robert Mangold. The show included the major painters associated with minimalism – Martin, Stella, Baer and Ryman, along with Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland, both of whom had become prominent in the 1950s in association with hard-edge painting or ‘post-painterly abstraction’, a term coined by Greenberg. Guggenheim Museum in New York, presented a set of new attitudes toward the medium. In 1966 the exhibition Systemic Painting, curated by Lawrence Alloway and held at the Solomon R. To let go of the canvas, as Bartlett did, was exactly in line with more radical contemporary directions in painting, as was her concern with employing a system such as the Fibonacci series in Surface Substitution to generate the terms of a painting. All were prominent painters who exhibited their work alongside the fabricated sculptural objects associated with minimalism. Painting had an important role within minimalism: in Agnes Martin’s hand-drawn grids set against atmospheric fields of blue, cream and grey (fig.3) Jo Baer’s white acrylic canvases, with internal frames of black and dark green Frank Stella’s striped paintings in which the internal forms repeat the contours of the edges (fig.4) and Robert Ryman’s articulation of the support, which by the late 1960s included steel plates. 5īartlett’s dotted plates emerged as part of a broad movement among ambitious young painters to reconfigure painting for a new era. System-based approaches to painting were likewise embraced in reaction to the subjectivity of the ‘Tenth Street touch’, as the gestural style of abstract expressionism associated with Willem de Kooning was dubbed by the formalist critic Clement Greenberg. This ‘impersonality’ was, in McShine’s estimation, a stance ‘against the open welded sculpture of the fifties, with its emotionalism, improvisation, and emphatic marks of individual sensibility’. Industrial materials and anonymity of execution were properties embraced by the ‘Space Age’ artist who could now ‘conceive his work, and entrust its execution to a manufacturer whose precision and skill convey the standardized “impersonality” that the artist may seek’. ‘Methods of industrial fabrication in the Space Age have facilitated the accuracy of many of the structurists’, McShine wrote in the catalogue introduction, referring to a group of artists who would become associated with minimalism. Curator Kynaston McShine articulated minimalism’s outlook on the occasion of his landmark exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, held at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966. Artists associated with minimalism frequently used standardised modules and industrial fabrication (for instance, the lead, zinc, magnesium or steel tiles of Carl Andre’s floor pieces, such as his 144 Magnesium Square 1969 fig.2), seeking to remove the hand of the artist and align their practice with industrial production. ![]() ![]() When Bartlett adopted a new method of applying commercial enamel paint onto enamelled steel plates in 1968, one which she would later employ in Surface Substitution on 36 Plates 1972 (Tate T06637 fig.1), her materials and confined ‘dotting’ process were a distinctive and personal variation on ideas that were circulating as she sought to establish herself in the New York art world. In 1965 critic Lucy Lippard identified a ‘third stream tendency’ in art, involving shaped canvases and painted structures, with artists employing commercial materials to address ‘the assault of commercialism on the American eye’. Judd, along with others including Sol LeWitt, painted his three-dimensional structures using commercial lacquers and enamels. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other.’ 1 As the artist Donald Judd wrote in 1965, ‘Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. The traditional distinction between painting and sculpture seemed irrelevant to artists interested in pushing the phenomenological and material specificity of their work. Painting was up for radical revision by the mid-1960s. ![]()
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