ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Robert Mangold’s Walls and Areas, two related bodies of work he exhibited at his breakthrough show at Fischbach Gallery in 1965. These paintings dialectically mediated the period’s dominant aesthetic poles: the literalism of contemporary sculpture and opticality of modernist painting. The chapter also analyzes Mangold’s recently published 1967 essay, “Flat Art,” a significant yet underappreciated piece of Minimalist polemic that argues for painting’s continued viability in the face of recent attacks. It concludes with a close reading of the Fischbach exhibition’s critical response, with a particular focus on the writing of Lucy Lippard, who advanced the period’s most sophisticated defense of painting’s analogue to the Minimalist object.
