Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The effects and influence of minimalism--the art movement in which artists removed personal expression and decorative detail from their work--continue to be felt today as art produced by its proponents continues to be exhibited and artists continue to use the style. The great movements of modern art, among them Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism, have challenged rather than accommodated critics and public. None more so than Minimalism, which unrelentingly questioned not only the nature of art, but also the place of art in society-especially the capitalist society of the United States. Beginning in the 1960s, artists like Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Eva Hesse, Robert Grosvenor, and Joel Shapiro reacted against what they saw as the flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism, seeking instead materials, forms, and procedures that explicitly do not convey the personal touch of the fabricator. Many observers have judged the artworks that resulted obstinately cerebral and unapproachable-or, worse, barren beyond the point of tedium. Others have recognized that these works are, in fact, revolutionary, embodying an elemental immediacy unprecedented in Western art. Giving no quarter to complacent illusion and habits of perception, the Minimalists pushed aesthetic thought deeply into the crust of unexamined ideas that most of us take for granted as cultural terra firma. In this volume, illustrated with works ranging from small-scale sculpture and hermetic paintings to vast "earthworks," Kenneth Baker, the award-winning art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, explores the history and challenge of Minimalism in the context not only of the trends it succeeded, but of those that have succeeded it. Minimalism: Art of Circumstance is one of those rare essays of critical insight that combine a comprehensive point of view with a revisionist spirit; for, in unfolding the history of his subject, Baker finally challenges the very notion of a "minimalist movement." The result is provocative, and in today's wildly pluralistic post-modern art world, this volume is living history-in fact, required reading. Art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker publishes in all the major journals, including Art in America, Artforum, Architectural Digest, Connoisseur, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many others. He has received the Manufacturers Hanover Trust-Art World Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism (1985) and his Minimalism studies have been supported by the Dia Foundation. Baker has taught at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Boston College. 128 illustrations

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This thoughtful, well-written book offers a clear, concise look at an art that reveals no personal touch but has an immediacy that challenges the viewer. Examining Minimalism's major figures--primarily the sculptors--Baker celebrates the movement's elegant relationship with the past, evident in Shaker plainness and Sheeler precisionism, and predicts its demise as Neo-Geo, simulation, and mass-produced, smugly overblown products begin to dominate. He thus traces a shift from ``an art that excludes the unnecessary to a culture so overcoded and content-addled that even the most trivial and passing forms and happenings appear to carry messages.'' A philosophical, provocative quesioning of aesthetic values and a comment on the social, political, and economic tenor of the American art scene; highly recommended.-- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

According to Baker, minimalist art is much more than a supercool pose: it is a spasm of revolt, and in its urge to clarify esthetic experience, it is rooted, he claims, in American pragmatism, with distant links to Shaker folk art and utopian social experiments like the Oneida and Brook Farm communities. Yet he notes that the ``patent silence'' of minimalist sculpture may be its chief value in a culture overwhelmed by trivial distractions. This readable, perceptive survey by the San Francisco Chronicle 's art critic takes a refreshingly undogmatic approach, amplified with 40 color and 80 black-and-white plates. In assessing Dan Flavin's emotionally charged fluorescents, Richard Serra's ``prop pieces'' on the verge of collapse, Bruce Nauman's deadpan satires, Sol LeWitt's intricate lattices suggestive of crystals or city plans, and works by Eva Hesse, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Joel Shapiro et al., Baker broadens our awareness of the many unpredictable forms the minimalist impulse can take. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Among contemporary art movements, the style known as "Minimalism" has proved particularly difficult to write about because it seems to have little reference to anything outside of itself. As a distinctive style it is concerned neither with describing the visual world nor with imitating the distinctive characteristics of any traditional movement in the visual arts. Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, has done a great service in describing the difficulties of the label Minimalism. He points out that the movement has a dual meaning--it can mean either devoid of ornament or decoration, or, in a broader sense, indistinguishable from found objects or unaltered raw material. Although it seems to decry the human presence, which is often claimed necessary to distinguish art from "non-art," Minimalism is, as Baker points out, rich in its associations, which are distinctly American, ranging from Shaker furniture to industrial aesthetics, and from the pragmatism of William James to the precisionist painting of Charles Sheeler. Baker has found in Minimalism's rejection of the materialistic culture surrounding its origins an art form that is antispontaneous, antinarcissistic, and anticapitalist. A valuable and worthwhile book by one of the most authoritative and quotable art critics. -K. Dills, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Booklist Review

A plain-speaking commentator sees the highly philosophical 1960s art movement known as minimalism as not a style but "a brief outbreak of critical thought and invention" that examined what the aesthetic experience was in a consumer society full of things referring to humans and human uses. The minimalists radically simplified the content of art so that anthropocentric meanings disappeared and the interplay between the viewer and the viewed became central to realizing that something is an artwork. The artists Baker investigates include the sculptor-constructors Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Walter De Maria and the painter Frank Stella, all of whose work presents large, simple shapes without obvious ideological content. Julie Rauer's excellent book design contributes greatly to the volume's value as a short, informative, and beautiful overview of an intellectually lofty subject. Notes, artists' statements, and index appended. --Ray Olson