The Tamesis
April 28, 1966 new york times Hilton Kramer, a conservative critic notorious for his disdain for contemporary art, reviewed the Jewish Museum’s “Primary Structures” exhibition. This disdain was on full display in his view of the exhibition: “Here are 42 American and British artists,” Kramer observed, “who are not at all concerned with personal style, subjective variation, private vocabulary—all those individual means of expression that have produced some of the most brilliant achievements of modern painting and sculpture.”
Instead, he continued, their work displayed “an air of extreme detachment, a theory that condescended to realize itself in the concrete specifications of a particular object.” Still, he understood that the show, organized by the legendary curator Kynaston McShine, represented “the first comprehensive look at a style that promised—or perhaps threatened—to become the style of our time. We will see many more of these ‘major structures’ before the 1860s are over.”
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And so it happened, as “Primary Structures” offered a survey of so-called minimalism—a name that ended up being hated by many of the artists who used it. Minimalism not only affects art, but also architecture, fashion, design, and just about everything else. The word became a veritable synonym for an essentially reductive thing or idea, and it continues to shape culture today. As the 60th anniversary of “Primary Structures” approaches, it’s worth looking back at the show and the medieval art world that birthed it.
That world was much smaller than it is now, and this belief has been challenged by recent exhibitions such as The Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015 at Whitechapel Gallery (2015), The World Goes Pop (2015-16) at the Tate Gallery, The Met The Museum of Fine Arts’ “Surrealism Beyond Boundaries” (2021-22), and even the Jewish Museum’s own revamp of 2014’s “Primary Structures” still argue that innovative art, often suffixed with “ism,” is conditioned by a specific location (19th-century Paris, 20th-century New York). Likewise, the ensuing avant-garde narrative is still promoted, namely that art history is driven by a series of cutting-edge styles, each superseding the previous one. With many interpreting this arc as a gradual shedding of detail or evidence of the artist’s hand, Minimalism seemed to be the logical pinnacle of Modernism.
“Main Structure” included a series of then-little-known names who, according to Kramer’s prediction, became a who’s who of art in the 1960s: Americans Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, John McCracken McCracken, Larry Bell, Robert Smithson and Judy Chicago; UK participants included Philip King, Michael Bolus and David Annesley.
However, as an organizer of the show, McShine never used the word minimalismlike many labels in art history, it was coined after the fact as a universal descriptor for a range of different approaches. In fact, he deliberately avoided categorizing his work, allowing it to speak for itself.
One thing that the “Primary Structure” artists do share is a historical debt to early modern and postwar practitioners of geometric abstraction. Kramer himself noted connections to Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, but he might have also added abstraction-adjacent figures such as Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman.
Nonetheless, the intentions of these early artists differed significantly from those of the participants in the “primary structure.” Malevich and Mondrian viewed painting as a spiritual platform purged of all but the most essential elements. Newman’s vast color gamut is designed to overwhelm the viewer with sublime sensory overload. Reinhardt’s “black paintings” are perhaps closest to Minimalism, despite the fact that he saw them as a form of escape from the constraints of art history.
In contrast, many artists in “Primary Structures” pushed formalism toward a state of complete neutrality, most notably the concept of “particular objects” developed by Donald Judd in his 1964 essay of the same name. Essentially, Judd rejected any form of referential role for the work of art, insisting that its “meaning” lay strictly in its autonomous occupation of three-dimensional space—a thing to be understood immediately, rather than as an assembly of parts. This means an absolute renunciation of the hallucinatory nature of painting, of any kind. “Actual space is inherently more powerful and concrete than painting on a flat surface,” he wrote, praising the medium as a whole, although that didn’t stop anyone from wanting to pursue it.
Cramer was especially annoyed that Judd’s work was being fabricated by others. But this methodology embodies a uniquely American can-do spirit based on hardware stores and factory floors (Judd’s work was often sequential in nature) and on the absence of history.
McShane’s idea was less radical. He included artists like the Englishman Anthony Caro, whose sculptures constituted a concrete form of Pictorialism, an expression derived from the sculptor David Smith, whose work was influenced by Picasso. Together with Judd pioneer Tony Smith, McShane positioned Kahlo as a pillar of the exhibition and its themes.
“Major Structure” was immediately recognized for its unconventionality, particularly its suggestion of the artist’s changing role from maker to designer. In fact, Judd was not the only one to have his work forged, and this remains standard procedure in contemporary art.
Despite Judd’s talk about the flaws of painting, most of the works in the show (including his own) are imbued with the graphic punch that is often inherent to 2D images. Many of the artists on display employed “a liberal use of color,” as Kramer puts it, as well as flat shapes that feel at home on the canvas.
Ultimately, “Main Structure” is inseparable from its site, as the Jewish Museum is one of the leading promoters of contemporary art, with projects including the first retrospectives of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Jones. Although this phase of the museum’s existence was short-lived, it reflected an era when artistic ideas remained important, regardless of resistance. Even Kramer had to admit that the exhibition “ultimately demonstrated the flourishing of a new sculptural aesthetic.”
