In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism was an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, and it is most strongly associated with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s.
New materials in 20th-century art were introduced to art making from the very beginning of the century. The introduction of new materials and heretofore non-art materials helped drive change in art during the 20th century. Traditional materials and techniques were not necessarily displaced in the 20th century. Rather, they functioned alongside innovations that came with the 20th century. Such mainstays as oil-on-canvas painting, and sculpting in traditional materials continued right through the 20th century into the 21st century. Furthermore, even "traditional" materials were greatly expanded in the course of the 20th century. The number of pigments available to artists has increased both in quantity and quality, by most reckoning. New formulations for traditional materials especially the commercial availability of acrylic paint have become widely used, introducing initial issues over their stability and longevity.
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.
Yves Klein was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art. He is known for the development and use of International Klein Blue.
Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.
Piero Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement in order to "tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values".
Nouveau réalisme is an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan. Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group, titled the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," in April 1960, proclaiming, "Nouveau Réalisme—new ways of perceiving the real." This joint declaration was signed on 27 October 1960, in Yves Klein's workshop, by nine people: Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Pierre Restany, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and the Ultra-Lettrists, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé; in 1961 these were joined by César, Mimmo Rotella, then Niki de Saint Phalle and Gérard Deschamps. The artist Christo showed with the group. It was dissolved in 1970.
Events from the year 1958 in art.
The Iris Clert Gallery was a single-room art gallery named after its Greek owner and curator, Iris Clert. It was located on 3 rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. It was open from 1955 to 1976 and during that time housed artworks from many successful and influential artists of the time, including Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Takis and René Laubies.
Claude Esteban was a French poet.
Yves Peintures is an artist's book by the French artist Yves Klein, originally published in Madrid, on 18 November 1954. This publication was Klein's first public gesture as an artist, featuring pages of 'commercially printed papers' that were seemingly reproductions of paintings that, in fact, didn't exist. Using a practice started by Marcel Duchamp, this use of readymade objects to represent nothing but themselves has been referred to as an early example of Postmodernism, using a series of carefully executed strategies to undermine its own authority, and as a precursor to conceptual art. 'The simplicity of his readymades is at once sublime and mischievous.'
"The booklet asserts its character straightaway in the preface: a wordless text of unbroken horizontal lines with the same two paragraph indentations on each page.... a homogenous continuum with no real beginning, middle, or end, and no content - at least insofar as there are no descriptions, analyses, or personalized utterances. The colour plates are similarly presented as anonymous entities, each a flat spatial field of an uninflected hue: turquoise, brown, purple, green, pink, gray, yellow, ultramarine, mint, orange, or red. Here, too, there is no attempt to represent or symbolize anything....
The booklet thus offers an utterly pared down presentation. Unlike most art books, it provides no reverential prose about the artist or the art, and no embellishing descriptions meant to convey meaning or context. Instead the booklet itself is made into a work of art that shares the same spirit of nothingness exemplified by the monochrome paintings that it features." Sidra Stich
Corpo d'aria is an artist's multiple by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. Manufactured between October 1959 and March 1960, the pieces are a box, a tripod base, a deflated balloon and a mouthpiece. 45 copies were made and sold at 30,000 lire each. Originally, any buyer could ask Manzoni to inflate the balloon himself, but would be charged an extra Deutschmark for every litre of air expanded. When fully expanded, the balloons measured 80 cm in diameter.
Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle is an artist's book and performance by the French artist Yves Klein. The work involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space, taking the form of a receipt, in exchange for gold; if the buyer wished, the piece could then be completed in an elaborate ritual in which the buyer would burn the receipt, and Klein would throw half of the gold into the Seine. The ritual would be performed in the presence of an art critic or distinguished dealer, an art museum director and at least two witnesses.
The Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, also known as MAMAC, is a museum dedicated to modern art and contemporary art. It opened on 21 June 1990, in Nice, France.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially Visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.
The concept of "The Void" in philosophy encompasses the ideas of nothingness and emptiness, a notion that has been interpreted and debated across various schools of metaphysics. In ancient Greek philosophy, the Void was discussed by thinkers like Democritus, who saw it as a necessary space for atoms to move, thereby enabling the existence of matter. Contrasting this, Aristotle famously denied the existence of a true Void, arguing that nature inherently avoids a vacuum.
Post-conceptual, postconceptual, post-conceptualism or postconceptualism is an art theory that builds upon the legacy of conceptual art in contemporary art, where the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work takes some precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The term first came into art school parlance through the influence of John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. The writer Eldritch Priest, specifically ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square from 1973 as an early example of post-conceptual art. It is now often connected to generative art and digital art production.
Marie Raymond (1908–1988) was an abstract painter from the Tachisme movement in the 50s. Raymond was one of the most successful painters of the post-war abstract movement in Paris. Raymond's success story remains unknown as she was eclipsed by her son's success. Although many female artists were known for being put in their husband's shadows, few were put in their son's shadows. Her son, Yves Klein, today remains one of the most prominent figures of the nouveau réalisme movement. However, in the 50s, one was more likely to fall upon a painting by Raymond than her son. Raymond would go on to become a prominent social figure in the Parisian post-war movement until the death of Yves Klein which had a profound impact on her life and art.
Shunk-Kender is the artistic collaboration of Harry Shunk and János Kender, who worked together largely from 1958 to 1973.
Representation or portrayals of the notion of The Void can be found in popular culture: including visual art, performance art, music, literature and film and video games.
