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Minimalism
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 A style of painting and sculpture in the mid 20th century in which the art elements are rendered with a minimum of lines, shapes, and sometimes colors. The goal was to reduce geometric abstract painting and sculpture to the barest essentials. For sculptors, it was "to transcend the production of mere art objects by producing three-dimensional works that straddled the boundary between art and the everyday world." Minimalist works, sometimes called ABC art, characteristically look and feel sparse, spare, restricted or empty. Art historian, Barbara Rose is credited with first using the term when she wrote an article titled 'ABC Art' in the October 1965 issue of "Art in America". She described "art pared down to a minimum". By the late 1960s, the term was commonly used for painting and sculpture that had one central image, clarified and severe, with no elements of representation. Minimalism includes the grid paintings of Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman and more aggressively geometric paintings of Robert Mangold and Brice Marden. The style was more associated with sculpture than painting, and often eliminated the artists involvement, substituting industrial made products such as the rolled steel structures of Donald Judd and Richard Serra or the flat, geometrically arranged tiles of Carl Andre. Dan Flavin created pieces from flourescent light tubes; Frank Stella worked with pliable metals and canvas; and Robert Morris did box-like cubes. Although the general public seems never to have warmed to Minimalism, corporate collection managers did because the artworks accented the many International Style office buildings that were built in the mid 20th Century. Source: Robert Atkins, "Art Speak"
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