The artist Carl Andre, who died at the age of 88, made his work from industrial materials such as bricks or squares of magnesium and recorded them in simple series. There was no illusion, no transformation of the basic material into something else. What you saw was what you got. And they didn’t like what the British public got in 1972 when the Tate bought Andre’s Equivalent VIII – a horizontal rectangular arrangement of 120 bricks on the floor.
The shockwaves of disapproval reached as far as New York, the center of the art world’s sophistication, where not a single drop of wine had been spilled on the private view in the Tibor de Nagy gallery on 72nd Street, then not only Equivalent VIII but Equivalents I VII were shown together. The American press capitalized on the commotion in London and the affair became part of the Andre legend. Books on minimalism would include a reproduction of Equivalent VIII – or Bricks, as it is commonly called – as a certificate of honesty.
The 1970s were a productive and successful time for Andre. But everything changed after the night in September 1985 when Andre and his third wife, the artist Ana Mendieta, were alone together in their 34th floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, and she fell out of a window to her death.
Andre was tried for manslaughter, 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 quietly showed up for his next opening and 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 used for Andre’s work – blurs the distinction between him and contemporaries such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin, although he preferred it to conceptualism, which he rejected outright. “I have always fought against the rise of conceptual art,” he says. “An idea in the head is not a work of art. A work of art has entered the world, it is a tangible reality.”
From the 1960s onwards, all these artists worked in simple modules and stripped away some more insignificant things than others – Judd’s work had architectural qualities, Flavin mounted strip lighting very beautifully, Morris played with shapes in space, but Andre only assembled ready-made elements in series.
Thinkers in the American art world such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried argued that Andre had reduced his work to the point of ineffability and unimagination, where it could only be material and could no longer be called art.
Andre himself found the concerns of critics and audiences beside the point. His sculpture, he said, which may have recalled a teenage visit to Stonehenge, was outdated by 3,000 years ago.
He was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, a few hours’ drive from Boston. Raymond Baxter. His father, George, a carpenter and naval draftsman, would take Carl to the museum in Quincy and both he and Carl’s mother, Margaret (née Johnson), an office manager, read poetry to their son. Andre later wrote concrete poetry, and a series of correspondence in this form between him and an artist friend, Hollis Frampton, called 12 Dialogues 1962-63, was published in 1980.
After school in Quincy, Andre completed his education at Phillips Academy, Andover. He received a scholarship to Kenyon College, Ohio, where he studied poetry, but was thrown out after two months. After military service, he moved to New York in 1957 with the intention of becoming an artist. He first worked as an editorial assistant at a publishing house and from 1960 to 1964, when he was working as an artist but not yet earning much, as a brakeman on the railroad in Pennsylvania.
In New York he met the abstract painter Frank Stella, who had also attended the Phillips Academy. Stella offered him space in his studio. Andre was there one day carving a large piece of wood when Stella stroked the uncarved side and remarked, “That’s sculpture too.” Andre said his first reaction was resentment, but Stella’s observation changed his life.
His first group exhibition was in 1964 at the Hudson River museum in Yonkers, followed by a one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy gallery. In 1969, together with artists such as Takis and Hans Haacke, he became one of the founders of the Art Workers’ Coalition, which decided that artists should take more social and political responsibility. It campaigned for New York’s museums – particularly the Museum of Modern Art – to adopt more inclusive exhibition policies towards women artists and artists of color, and successfully pressured MoMA and other museums to adopt a Free entry day.
In 1970, Andre received a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. There, on the ground floor, he laid out his 37 works: a huge square of metal plates in six materials (aluminium, steel, copper, zinc, lead, magnesium) that filled the atrium with their presence and visitors’ preconceptions about their challenged work. minimalist art as dry or boring.
Andre sold a lot of work at that time, including three pieces to the Tate. Their first screening went without reaction, but after a 1976 Sunday Times piece highlighting the taxpayers’ money spent on the bricks, the outcry was enormous. According to Tate director Nicholas Serota: “For a long time afterwards, the Tate was somewhat less ambitious in its acquisitions.”
Throughout this decade and the next, Andre continued to experiment with materials. “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 the Turner of matter.”
In 1979, Andre met Mendieta through their 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, fueled by heavy drinking on both sides. Andre claimed to have no memory of the events leading to Mendieta’s death. While he suggested that she may have fallen while trying to close a window, or that she had committed suicide, many of Mendieta’s friends and followers believed that he had deliberately pushed her, or that she fell while the couple was fighting. .
Andre’s friends, dealers and investors stood by him during and after the trial, but Mendieta remained convinced that he was guilty even after his acquittal, indicating that not all the evidence had been presented to the court. As he continued to work, exhibit and sell, especially in Europe, where the case had received less publicity, anger grew among feminist art groups in New York.
In 1992, 500 protesters organized by the Women’s Action Coalition gathered outside the SoHo Guggenheim after a sculpture of Andre was included in the opening show, holding a banner that read: “Carl Andre is at the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta? Three years later, feminist activists the Guerrilla Girls released a poster describing Andre as the OJ Simpson of the art world. André did not respond. “I’m quite phlegmatic,” he said. “Quite stoic. As a child I learned well, even though I was sometimes bullied. I was a fat kid.”
However, attention to Mendieta’s death grew over time, along with her stock as an artist, and the campaign group Whereisanamendieta, named after that original slogan, continued to raise awareness. At the opening of the Tate Modern extension in 2016, the group discussed the omission of Mendieta’s work – and the inclusion of Andre’s – in the new building.
In 2013 Andre had a major retrospective at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which traveled internationally, including to the Turner Contemporary, Margate.
He was married first to Barbara Brown, a teacher, and second to Rosemarie Castoro, a painter. In 1999, he married Melissa Kretschmer, an artist. She and his sister, Carol, survive him.
• Carl Andre, artist, born September 16, 1935; died January 24, 2024