[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ART92749-copy.jpeg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tOn April 28, 1966, The New York Times<\/em> ran a review of the Jewish Museum\u2019s \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d exhibition by Hilton Kramer, a conservative critic notorious for his disdain for contemporary art. That contempt was amply displayed in his views on the show: \u201cHere are 42 American and British artists,\u201d Kramer observed, \u201cwho care nothing for the personal touch, the subjective inflection, the private vocabulary\u2014the whole panoply of individual expressive devices that have yielded modern painting and sculpture some of their most glorious achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tInstead, he continued, their work demonstrated \u201can air of extreme detachment, of theory condescending to realize itself in the concrete specifications of a particular object.\u201d Still, he understood that the exhibition, organized by legendary curator Kynaston McShine, represented the \u201cfirst comprehensive glimpse of a style that promises\u2014or perhaps one should say threatens\u2014to become our period style. We are going to see a good many more of these \u2018Primary Structures\u2019 before the nineteen-sixties have come to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAnd so it came to pass, as \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d offered the ur-survey of what would be called Minimalism\u2014a name eventually hated by many of the artists to whom it was applied. Minimalism impacted not only art, but also architecture, fashion, design, and just about everything else. The term became a veritable synonym for a thing or idea that was reductive in nature, and it continues to shape culture today. With the 60th anniversary of \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d approaching, it\u2019s worth looking back at the show and the mid-century art world that birthed it.<\/p>\n \n\tThat world was much smaller than it is now, and the belief\u2014since challenged by recent shows like Whitechapel Gallery\u2019s \u201cAdventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915\u20132015\u201d (2015), Tate\u2019s \u201cThe World Goes Pop\u201d (2015\u201316), the Met\u2019s \u201cSurrealism Beyond Borders\u201d (2021\u201322), and even the Jewish Museum\u2019s own reworking of \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d in 2014\u2014still held that innovative art, generally suffixed with \u201c-ism,\u201d was conditioned on a particular place (Paris during the 19th century, New York during the 20th). Likewise, the concomitant avant-garde narrative that art history was driven by a succession of cutting-edge styles, with each supplanting its predecessor, was still honored. Since many interpreted this arc to mean a progressive shedding of detail, or evidence of the artist\u2019s hand, Minimalism seemed like a logical culmination of modernism.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cPrimary Structures\u201d included a roster of then little-known names who, per Kramer\u2019s prediction, became a who\u2019s who of 1960s art: the Americans Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Robert Smithson, and Judy Chicago; and British participants including Philip King, Michael Bolus, and David Annesley.<\/p>\n \n\tAs the organizer of the show, however, McShine never used the word Minimalism<\/em>, which, like so many labels in art history, was coined after the fact as a one-size-fits-all descriptor for a range of differing approaches. In fact, he studiously avoided categorizing the work, letting it speak for itself.<\/p>\n \n\tOne thing the artists of \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d did share was an historical debt to the early-Modern and postwar practitioners of geometric abstraction. Kramer himself noted connections to Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, but he might have added the AbEx-adjacent likes of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman.<\/p>\n \n\tStill, these earlier artists differed significantly from the participants in \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d in their intentions. Malevich and Mondrian saw painting as a spiritual platform, purged of all but its most essential elements. Newman\u2019s vast color fields were meant to overwhelm viewers with a sublime sensory overload. Reinhardt\u2019s \u201cBlack Paintings\u201d were probably closest to Minimalism, though in fact he viewed them as a form of liberation from the yoke of art history.<\/p>\n \n\tBy contrast, many of the artists in \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d pushed formalism to a state of totalizing neutrality, most conspicuously in the concept of the \u201cspecific object\u201d developed by Donald Judd in his 1964 essay of the same name. Basically, Judd rejected any kind of referential role for a work of art, insisting that its \u201cmeaning\u201d lay strictly in its autonomous occupation of three-dimensional space\u2014a thing to be apprehended all at once rather than as a composition of parts. This meant an absolute renunciation of painting for being illusionistic, no matter the type. \u201cActual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface,\u201d he wrote, putting paid to an entire medium, though that hardly stopped anyone from wanting to pursue it.<\/p>\n \n\tJudd had his work fabricated by others, something that particularly rankled Kramer. But this methodology spoke to a uniquely American, can-do sensibility based on the hardware store and factory floor (Judd\u2019s work was often serial in nature), as well as on an absenting of history.<\/p>\n \n\tMcShine wasn\u2019t nearly as militant in his thinking. He included artists like the Brit Anthony Caro, whose sculptures constituted a form of pictorialism made concrete, an expression derived from David Smith, a sculptor whose formative work was influenced by Picasso. Along with Judd precursor Tony Smith, McShine positioned Caro as a pillar of the exhibition and its themes.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cPrimary Structures\u201d was immediately recognized for its break with convention, especially in the way it suggested a shift in the artist\u2019s role from maker to designer. Indeed, Judd wasn\u2019t alone in having his work fabricated by others, and it remains a standard procedure in contemporary art.<\/p>\n \n\tFor all of Judd\u2019s talk about the deficiencies of painting, though, much of the work in the show\u2014including his own\u2014packed a graphic punch that was usually native to 2D imagery. Many of the artists on view employed a \u201cfree-wheeling use of color,\u201d as Kramer put it, as well as planar shapes that would feel at home on canvas.<\/p>\n \n\tUltimately \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d was inseparable from its venue, as the Jewish Museum was one of the prime movers of contemporary art at a time when its program included the first retrospectives of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Though this phase in the museum\u2019s existence was brief, it spoke to an era when ideas in art still counted, no matter the pushback. Even Kramer had to concede that the show \u201cconclusively demonstrates the flourishing existence of an entirely new sculptural esthetics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/feature\/primary-structures-exhibition-what-was-why-so-important-1234781225\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ART92749-copy.jpeg?w=1024″] On April 28, 1966, The New York Times ran a review of the Jewish Museum\u2019s \u201cPrimary Structures\u201d exhibition by Hilton Kramer, a conservative critic notorious for his disdain for contemporary art. That contempt was amply displayed in his views on the show: \u201cHere are 42 American and British artists,\u201d Kramer observed, \u201cwho […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1907326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1907326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1907326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1907326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1907326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}