Barbara Rose is an American art historian and art critic

Art critic

An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...

. She was educated at Smith College

Smith College

Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...

, Barnard College

Barnard College

Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...

 and Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. She was married to artist Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...

 between 1961 and 1969. In 1965 she published ABC Art in which she described the characteristics of minimal art.

ABC Art

In her essay, ABC Art, Rose considers the diverse roots of minimalism

Minimalism

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...

 in the work of Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

 as well as the choreography of Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham

Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...

, the art criticism of Greenberg

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...

, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the novels of Robbe-Grillet. In examining the historical roots of minimal art in 1960s America, Rose draws a distinction between Malevich's "search for the transcendental, universal, absolute" and Duchamp's "blanket denial of the existence of absolute values."

Rose grouped some 1960s artists as closer to Malevich, some as closer to Duchamp, and some as between the two. Closer to Malevich are Walter Darby Bannard

Walter Darby Bannard

Walter Darby Bannard , also known as Darby Bannard, is an American abstract painter.Bannard attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, which continued after graduation and eventuated in the extreme...

, Larry Zox

Larry Zox

Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....

, Robert Huot, Lyman Kipp

Lyman Kipp

Lyman Kipp is a sculptor and painter who creates pieces that are composed of strong vertical and horizontal objects and are often painted in bold primary colors recalling arrangements by De Stijl Constructivists...

, Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle

Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line.- Biography :...

, Jan Evans, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt

Anne Truitt

Anne Truitt was a major American artist of the mid-20th century; she is associated with both minimalism and Color Field artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland....

. Closer to Duchamp are Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager is an American painter, illustrator and sculptor, born in 1923 in Washington, D.C.. Artschwager is best known for his stylistic independence; although he has associations with the Pop Art movement, Conceptual art and Minimalism....

 and Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

. Between Malevich and Duchamp she places Robert Morris

Robert Morris (artist)

Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...

, Donald Judd

Donald Judd

Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...

, Carl Andre

Carl Andre

Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American...

, and Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.-Early life and career:...

. Her conclusion is that minimal art is both transcendental

Transcendence (religion)

In religion transcendence refers to the aspect of God's nature which is wholly independent of the physical universe. This is contrasted with immanence where God is fully present in the physical world and thus accessible to creatures in various ways...

 and negative

Negative

- Science and mathematics :* Negative number* Negative mass* Negative energy * Electrical polarity* Negative result * Negative lenses, uses to describe diverging optics, see lens - Photography :...

:

"The art I have been talking about is obviously a negative art of denial and renunciation. Such protracted asceticism is normally the activity of contemplatives or mystics...Like the mystic, in their work these artists deny the ego and the individual personality, seeking to evoke, it would seem, the semihypnotic state of blank unconsciousness."

She also contrasts minimal art with Pop Art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

:

"...if Pop Art is the reflection of our environment, perhaps the art I have been describing is its antidote, even if it is a hard one to swallow."

See also

• Neo-Dada
  Neo-Dada
  Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
  
  
• Abstract Illusionism
  Abstract Illusionism
  Abstract illusionism, a name coined by New York art gallery owner and author Louis K. Meisel, is an artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the mid 1970s...
  
  
• Experiments in Art and Technology
• Minimal art