Introduction

Minimalism has been canonized as the movement that sounded painting’s death knell. The protagonists in this narrative were sculptors like Donald Judd and Robert Morris, who conceived their practices in direct opposition to a prevailing teleological understanding of painting advanced by such influential modernist critics as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Judd and Morris’s arguments rank among the most well-rehearsed in all of post-war art history. Like Judd, Morris was an attentive reader of Greenberg, but unlike Judd, he affirmed the critic’s understanding of painting as an exclusively optical medium so as to distinguish it from sculpture’s essential spatiality and tactility. The polemics of Judd and Morris decisively shaped Minimalism’s historicization. By once again isolating painting from sculpture, the exhibition implied that painterly Minimalism represented a romantic variant of a movement whose leading practitioners disavowed just such a sentiment. The scholarly literature on Minimalism largely reflects the view of painting as a regressive manifestation of the movement.