Artist Carl Andre, who has died aged 88, made his works from industrial materials such as brick or magnesium squares and arranged them in simple series. There was no illusion involved, no transmutation of the basic material into something else. What you saw is what you got. And in 1972, when the Tate bought Andre’s Equivalent VIII (a horizontal rectangular arrangement of 120 bricks on the floor), the British public did not like it.
Shockwaves of disapproval reached New York, the center of art world sophistication, where not a drop of wine was spilled at a special exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy gallery on 72nd Street. VII was shown together. The American press gave great importance to the fuss in London, and the incident became part of the Andre legend. Books on minimalism carried a copy of Equivalent VIII – or Bricks, as it was commonly known – like a certificate of honesty.
The 1970s were a productive and successful period for Andre. But everything changed after the night in September 1985, when Andre and his third wife, artist Ana Mendieta, were left alone in their 34th-floor apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village and she died after falling from the window.
Andre was tried for second-degree murder, but after a high-profile trial in 1988 in which he decided not to testify and waive his right to a jury, the judge found room for reasonable doubt and acquitted him. “Justice has been served,” Andre said as he left the court. He arrived quietly at his next opening, and both his reputation and the market for his work began to revive, but he never managed to escape the shadow of Mendieta’s death.
Minimalism (the term commonly applied to Andre’s work) blurs the differences between himself and contemporaries such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin; but he preferred it to conceptualism, which he completely rejected. “I was always struggling with the rise of conceptual art,” he said. “The idea in the head is not a work of art. A work of art exists in the world, it is a concrete reality.”
From the 60s onwards, all these artists worked in simple modules, eliminating more unnecessary things than others; Judd’s work had architectural qualities, Flavin beautifully incorporated strip lighting, Morris played with forms in space, but Andre merely assembled ready-made elements into arrays.
Thinkers from the American art world such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried argued that Andre reduced his works to the point of inexpressibility and lack of imagination, which could only be material and could no longer be called art.
Andre himself thought the concerns of critics and the public were irrelevant. He said the statue, perhaps reminiscent of a visit to Stonehenge in his youth, became obsolete 3,000 years ago.
He was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, a few hours from Boston. Raymond Baxter’s father, George, a carpenter and marine painter, would take Carl to the museum in Quincy, and both he and Carl’s mother, Margaret (née Johnson), an office manager, would read poetry to their son. Andre later wrote concrete poetry, and a series of correspondences in this form between himself and his artist friend Hollis Frampton, called 12 Dialogues 1962-63, were published in 1980.
After school in Quincy, Andre completed his education at Phillips Academy in Andover. He received a scholarship to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied poetry, but was expelled after two months. After completing his military service, he moved to New York in 1957 to become an artist. He first worked as an editorial assistant at a publishing house and as a brakeman on the Pennsylvania railroad from 1960 to 1964, when he was working as an artist but not yet making much money.
In New York he met the abstract painter Frank Stella, who was also at Phillips Academy. Stella offered him a place in her studio. One day, Andre was working there, carving a large wooden block, and Stella caressed the uncarved side and said: “This is also a statue.” Andre said his initial reaction was anger, but Stella’s observation changed his life.
His first group exhibition was at the Hudson River museum in Yonkers in 1964, followed by a one-man show at the Tibor de Nagy gallery. In 1969, together with artists such as Takis and Hans Haacke, he became a founding member of the Art Workers Coalition, which decided that artists should take more social and political responsibility. She campaigned for museums in New York, particularly the Museum of Modern Art, to adopt a more inclusive exhibition policy for women artists and artists of color, and successfully pressured MoMA and other museums to implement a free admission day.
In 1970, Andre was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. There, on the ground floor, he placed his work of 37 pieces: a huge square metal plate composed of six materials (aluminium, steel, copper, zinc, lead, magnesium), which fills the atrium with its presence and challenges visitors’ preconceptions about art. Minimalist art is dry or dull.
Andre sold many works during this period, including three to Tate. Their first demonstrations were met with little reaction, but in 1976 there was outrage after a Sunday Times article highlighting the taxpayers’ money spent on bricks. According to Tate director Nicholas Serota: “Tate has been less assertive in acquisitions for a long time.”
During this decade and the next, Andre continued to experiment with material. “The periodic table of elements is to me what the color spectrum is to a painter,” he said. “My ambition as an artist is to be a Transformer of matter.”
In 1979, Andre met Mendieta through mutual friends and fellow artists Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, and the couple married in Rome in 1985. According to friends, their relationship was volatile and caused by excessive drinking on both sides. Andre claimed to have no memory of the events leading to Mendieta’s death. Although he suggested that Mendieta may have fallen while trying to close a window or attempted suicide, many of Mendieta’s friends and followers believed that she either pushed him on purpose or that she fell while the two were fighting. .
Andre’s friends, dealers, and investors sided with him throughout and after the trial, but Mendieta remained convinced of his guilt even after he was acquitted, suggesting that not all the evidence was presented to the court. As she continued to work, exhibit, and sell, especially in Europe where the cause was less publicized, outrage grew among feminist art groups in New York.
In 1992, 500 protesters organized by the Women’s Action Coalition gathered outside the SoHo Guggenheim following the inclusion of an Andre statue in the inaugural exhibition, holding a sign that read: “Carl Andre is at the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta?” Three years later, feminist activists Guerrilla Girls released a poster describing Andre as the OJ Simpson of the art world. André did not answer. “I’m a pretty chill person,” he said. “He’s pretty stoic. I learned very well that I was sometimes bullied as a child. “I was a fat kid.”
However, interest in Mendieta’s death increased over time along with her identity as an artist, and the Whereisanamendieta campaign group, which took its name from this first slogan, continued to raise awareness. At the opening of the Tate Modern extension in 2016, the group criticized the neglect of Mendieta’s work and the inclusion of Andre’s work in the new building.
In 2013 Andre had a major retrospective exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York; This exhibition has traveled internationally, including Turner Contemporary in Margate.
He married first the teacher Barbara Brown and second the painter Rosemarie Castoro. He married artist Melissa Kretschmer in 1999. He and his sister Carol survived.
• Carl Andre, artist, born September 16, 1935; Died January 24, 2024