by The artist Carl Andre, who has died aged 88, made his work from industrial materials such as bricks or magnesium squares, and laid them down in a simple series. There was no illusion involved, no transformation of the basic material into something else. What you saw is what you got. And 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 – it didn’t like.
The shock waves of disapproval reached as far as New York, the center of art world sophistication when not a single drop of wine was spilled at the private viewing at Tibor de Nagy’s gallery on 72nd Street, when not only Equivalent VIII but Equivalents I to VII were shown together . The American press made great fun of the fuss in London and the affair became part of the Andre legend. A reproduction of Equivalent VIII – or Bricks, as it is usually called – on books on minor linguistics would be a guarantee of integrity.
The 1970s were a prolific 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 from a window to her death.
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 beyond a reasonable doubt and acquitted him. “Justice was served,” Andre said as he left the court. He quietly succeeded in his next opening and his reputation, and the market for his work, began to revive, but he was unable to escape the shadow of Mendieta’s death.
Minimalism – the term usually applied to Andre’s work – softens the differences between him and contemporaries such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin, although he prefers it to conceptualism, which he rejected. completely for him. “I’ve always fought the rise of conceptual art,” he said. “Thinking in the head is not a work of art. A work of art is out in the world, it is a tangible reality.”
From the 60s onwards, all these artists worked in simple modules and removed unnecessary things more than others – Judd’s work had architectural qualities, Flavin put together beautiful strip lighting, Morris played with forms in space, but Andre only assembled ready-made elements into sequences.
Thinkers in the American art world such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried argued that Andre had reduced his work to the point of non-representation and non-imaginativeness, that it could only be material and could no longer be called art.
Andre himself received the attention of critics and the public near the point. A sculpture, he said, perhaps to commemorate a teenage visit to Stonehenge, out of date 3,000 years ago.
He was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, a few hours from Boston. Raymond Baxter His father, George, a carpenter and marine magician, would take Carl to the museum in Quincy and he and Carl’s mother, Margaret (nee Johnson), an office manager, would read poetry to their son. Andre subsequently wrote concrete poetry, and a series of correspondence in this form, between himself and an artist friend, Hollis Frampton, entitled 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 kicked out after two months. After national service, he moved to New York in 1957 with the intention of becoming an artist. He first worked as an editorial assistant in a publishing house and, from 1960 to 1964, when he was working as an artist but still not making much money, as a brakeman on the Pennsylvania railroad.
In New York he met the abstract painter Frank Stella, who was also at the Phillips Academy. Stella offered him space in her studio. Andre was working there one day, carving into a large block of wood, when Stella tore off the uncarved side and said: “That’s the sculpture too.” Andre said his first reaction was resentment, but Stella’s observation changed his life.
His first group show was at the Hudson River museum in Yonkers, in 1964, followed by a one-man show at the Tibor de Nagy gallery. In 1969 he became a founding member, along with artists such as Takis and Hans Haacke, of the Artists’ Alliance, which resolved for artists to take on more social and political responsibility. He campaigned for New York museums – particularly the Museum of Modern Art – to have a more inclusive exhibition policy towards female artists and artists of color, and successfully pressured MoMA and other museums to allow a day off to apply.
In 1970 Andre was given a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Then, on the ground floor, he laid his 37 Pieces of Work: a huge square of metal plates in six materials (aluminum, steel, copper, zinc, lead, magnesium) that filled the atrium with its presence and challenged the visitors’ preconceptions about minimalist art as being dry or dull.
Andre sold a lot of work by this time, including three pieces to the Tate. There was no reaction to their initial display, but after a Sunday Times piece in 1976, drawing attention to the taxpayers’ money spent on the bricks, it became a sensation. According to Tate director Nicholas Serota: “For a long time afterwards the Tate was less ambitious in its acquisitions.”
Throughout this decade and the next, Andre continued to experiment with materials. “The periodic table of elements is the color spectrum for a painter,” he said. “My ambition as an artist is to be a Turner of content.”
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 that he did not remember anything about the events leading up to Mendieta’s death. Although he suggested that she may have fallen while trying to close a window, or that she may have committed suicide, many of Mendieta’s friends and fans believed that he had accidentally pushed her. business, or that she fell while the two were fighting. .
Andre’s friends, dealers and investors stood by him throughout and after the trial, but Mendieta remained adamant that he was guilty even after his acquittal, suggesting that not all of the evidence was brought before the court. Although he continued to work, exhibit and sell, especially in Europe, where the case was less publicized, 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 statue of Andre was included in its inaugural show, holding a banner that read: “Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim. Where’s Ana Mendieta?” Three years later the feminist activists the Guerrilla Girls released a poster describing Andre as the OJ Simpson of the art world. Andre didn’t answer. “I’m quite a plegmatic person,” he said. ” Rather stoic. I learned well as a child, when I would be bullied sometimes. I was a fat kid.”
However, attention to Mendieta’s death only increased over time, along with his stock as an artist, and the Whereisanamendieta campaign group, named after that initial slogan, continued to raise awareness. When the Tate Modern extension opened in 2016, the group ignored Mendieta’s work – and Andre’s inclusion – 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 firstly to Barbara Brown, a teacher, and secondly to Rosemarie Castoro, a painter. In 1999 he married Melissa Kretschmer, an artist. She and her sister, Carol, survive him.
• Carl Andre, artist, born 16 September 1935; he died 24 January 2024
