A spokesperson for the Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan, which represented him, confirmed his loss of life however didn’t cite a particular trigger.
Throughout his practically seven-decade profession, Mr. Andre was a sculptor in addition to a poet, creating greater than 2,000 sculptures and about as many poems, a lot of them experimental items that he known as “typewriter drawings.” His work was cool and serene, using ready-made supplies organized in austere geometric kinds, and helped gas the minimalist response to summary expressionism and Twentieth-century sculpture extra broadly.
Though he began out making monumental constructions and elevated wooden carvings, Mr. Andre made his identify within the mid-Sixties with works that had been resolutely horizontal — as degree because the rails that he traversed as a onetime freight conductor and brakeman, and as flat because the lake that he canoed throughout a pivotal summer season in New Hampshire.
“My perfect piece of sculpture is a street,” he liked to say.
For his sculpture “Lever,” which introduced him to prominence in 1966 when it was exhibited on the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, he lined up a single row of firebricks towards a wall, 137 in all. Inside just a few years he had launched his “Plains” and “Squares” sequence, crafting checkerboard sculptures manufactured from metal, aluminum, zinc and magnesium plates. Viewers had been inspired to stroll throughout every bit, registering modifications in texture and sound.
“By way of pretty easy means, Mr. Andre rethought what sculpture historically was, the way it labored,” the New York Instances artwork critic Holland Cotter wrote in 2014, reviewing a retrospective of the sculptor’s work at Dia Beacon within the Hudson Valley. “He distributed with the standard formal expertise. He eradicated the phantasm of permanence, the essence of monumental. And he removed pedestals, the enshrining elevations that set sculpture other than the world.”
Early on, his work steadily impressed extra confusion than respect. When the Tate Gallery in Britain acquired his 1966 sculpture “Equivalent VIII,” an oblong association of 120 bricks, conservative critics accused the museum of losing taxpayers’ cash on a “pile of bricks.” One customer tossed a bucket of blue dye on the exhibit.
Mr. Andre’s 1977 set up “Stone Subject Sculpture,” an out of doors sculpture of three-dozen boulders that was commissioned for a public park in Hartford, Conn., drew the ire of native residents who questioned how he may name it artwork. “It’s only a bunch of rocks, little youngsters may do this,” stated the mayor, who declared that the sculptor had introduced “worldwide ridicule” to the town.
Requested by one customer whether or not he was trying an elaborate prank, Mr. Andre demurred. “I could also be placing myself on,” he stated throughout a visit to Hartford. “If I’m deceiving you, then I’ve deceived myself. It’s doable.”
At instances, Mr. Andre appeared to be as unorthodox as his sculptures. He espoused Marxist political theories, railing towards business forces that made him “a saved artist of the imperial class.” He grew a full beard and shoulder-length hair. He dressed completely in bib overalls, explaining that the garment was the one factor that reliably match over his stomach.
His bohemian picture solely appeared to reinforce his stature within the artwork world, the place he reigned as one of many nation’s most intriguing sculptors — “the excessive priest of Minimal,” as artwork critic Peter Schjeldahl once put it — whereas often exhibiting at main museums.
That started to vary after the early morning of Sept. 8, 1985, when his third spouse, Mendieta, plunged to her loss of life at age 36, falling from a bed room window of their Thirty fourth-floor house in Greenwich Village. The couple had married eight months earlier, to the shock of buddies who had adopted their turbulent relationship from its starting within the late Nineteen Seventies by means of public shouting matches and a months-long separation.
“My spouse is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the truth that I used to be extra, eh, uncovered to the general public than she was,” Mr. Andre stated in a taped 911 name after Mendieta’s loss of life. “And he or she went to the bed room, and I went after her, and she or he went out the window.”
Mr. Andre later advised police that he was not within the room when she fell. He was arrested the night time of Mendieta’s loss of life, jailed on Rikers Island and charged with second-degree homicide. A bunch of sellers and buddies, together with artist Frank Stella, helped him post the $250,000 bail.
After three years of extremely publicized authorized proceedings, Mr. Andre was acquitted in a nonjury trial in 1988. However the case continued to divide the artwork world, as Mendieta’s household, buddies and allies remained satisfied that Mr. Andre had thrown her out the window. The household stated that Mendieta, a sculptor, painter and video and efficiency artist who had gained a Guggenheim grant in 1980, had been planning to divorce Mr. Andre. Additionally they argued {that a} concern of heights would have saved her removed from the window.
For years after the trial, New York museums shunned mounting one-man exhibits of Mr. Andre’s work. The Guerrilla Women, a feminist artwork collective, issued a poster calling him “the O.J. of the artwork world.” When Dia Beacon organized its 2014 retrospective, greater than a dozen poets, artists and activists organized a “public cry-in,” weeping within the museum. Some shouted “We want Ana Mendieta was nonetheless alive!” as they had been escorted out by guards.
“It’s onerous to think about an artist whose profession has been so affected by circumstances that don’t have anything to do together with his artwork,” journalist and artwork critic Calvin Tomkins wrote in 2011, profiling Mr. Andre for the New Yorker.
Trying again on Mendieta’s loss of life, Mr. Andre theorized to the journal that his spouse, who stood “barely 5 toes,” misplaced her stability whereas reaching as much as attempt to shut the bed room window throughout a balmy night time that had abruptly turned cool.
A number of years later, when requested by the Instances in regards to the influence that her loss of life had on his life, he was transient however direct. “It didn’t change my view of the world or of my work,” he said, “nevertheless it modified me, as all tragedy does.”
The youngest of three youngsters, Carl George Andre was born in Quincy, Mass., on Sept. 16, 1935. His father, a Swedish immigrant, designed freshwater plumbing methods for ships. His mom was an workplace supervisor turned homemaker.
Mr. Andre stated he “obtained the artwork craze” whereas finding out on a scholarship at Phillips Academy prep faculty in Andover, Mass., the place he holed up within the faculty studio to color in his free time. He briefly attended Kenyon Faculty in Ohio — the varsity had shoddy artwork amenities, he recalled, so he stopped going to class — and went residence to Quincy, the place he labored in a manufacturing facility and saved sufficient cash to journey to London. Whereas there, he stayed with an aunt who took him to Stonehenge. The journey satisfied him of his vocation as a sculptor.
After a stint within the Military, Mr. Andre moved to New York Metropolis in 1957. He started making wood sculptures the following 12 months, wielding a noticed or chisel to craft timber items that, with their geometric patterns and rigorous inside logic, drew comparisons to the work of Stella, the painter whose studio he shared.
For just a few years, he supported his art-making by working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He had his first solo present in 1965, with an association of nine-foot-long plastic foam beams and girders that stuffed the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, and his first retrospective in 1970, on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on the Higher East Aspect. His final large-scale sculpture, “5VCEDAR5H,” an meeting of 10 cedar blocks, was exhibited in 2022 at Paula Cooper Gallery.
Mr. Andre’s first two marriages, to Barbara Brown, a schoolteacher, and Rosemarie Castoro, a fellow minimalist, resulted in divorce. Survivors embrace his fourth spouse, artist Melissa L. Kretschmer, and a sister.
When requested in regards to the nature of his work, whether or not there was some greater that means he was making an attempt to specific, Mr. Andre was equivocal.
“Sure, artwork is expressive, however it’s expressive of that which will be expressed in no different manner,” he advised Art Forum in 1970. As he noticed it, minimalism was actually about eliminating the extraneous, together with cultural references and different strategies of that means — “issues that appear to have one thing to do with artwork however don’t have something to do with artwork in any respect.”
“You must actually rid your self of these securities and certainties and assumptions and get right down to one thing which is nearer and resembles some sort of blankness,” he continued. “Then one should assemble once more out of this lowered circumstance. That’s one other manner, maybe, of an artwork poverty; one has to impoverish one’s thoughts.”
