The artist Carl Andre, who has died aged 88, made his work from industrial materials such as bricks or squares of magnesium, and laid them down in simple series. No illusion was involved, no transformation of the basic material into something else. What you saw was 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 did not like.
The shock waves of disapproval reached as far as New York, the centre of art world sophistication where not a single drop of wine had spilled at the private view at the Tibor de Nagy gallery on 72nd Street, when not just Equivalent VIII but Equivalents I to VII were shown together. The American press gave great play to the fuss in London and the affair became part of the Andre legend. Books on minimalism would carry a reproduction of Equivalent VIII – or Bricks, as it is usually known – like a certificate of probity.
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, following a high-profile trial in 1988 in which he decided not to give evidence and to forgo his right to a jury, the judge found room for reasonable doubt and acquitted him. “Justice has been served,” Andre said as he left the court. He quietly turned up for his next opening and his reputation, and the market for his work, began to revive, but he never managed to escape the shadow of Mendieta’s death.
Minimalism – the term usually applied to Andre’s work – flattens out the distinctions between him and contemporaries such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin, although he preferred it to conceptualism, which he rejected utterly. “I was always fighting the rise of conceptual art,” he said. “An idea in the head is not a work of art. A work of art is out in the world, is a tangible reality.”
From the 60s, all those artists worked in simple modules and stripped away inessentials some more than others – Judd’s work had architectural qualities, Flavin assembled strip lighting very beautifully, Morris played with forms in space, but Andre merely assembled readymade elements in 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 inexpressiveness and unimaginativeness, at which it could only be material and could no longer be called art.
Andre himself found the preoccupations of critics and public beside the point. His sculpture, he said, perhaps recalling a teenage visit to Stonehenge, went out of date 3,000 years ago.
He was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, a couple of hours from Boston. His father, George, a carpenter and marine draughtsman, would take Carl to the museum in Quincy and both he and Carl’s mother, Margaret (nee Johnson), an office manager, read poetry to their son. Andre later wrote concrete poetry, and a series of correspondence in this form, between him and an artist friend, Hollis Frampton, called 12 Dialogues 1962-63, was published in 1980.
After school in Quincy, Andre rounded off his education at Phillips Academy, Andover. He got 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 intending to become an artist. He worked first as an editorial assistant in a publishing house and, from 1960 to 1964, when he was working as an artist but not yet making much money, as a brakeman on the Pennsylvania railroad.
In New York he met the abstract painter Frank Stella, who had also been at Phillips Academy. Stella offered him space in his studio. Andre was working there one day, carving into a large baulk of wood, when Stella stroked the uncarved side and remarked: “That is sculpture too.” Andre said his initial reaction was resentment, but that 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 exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy gallery. In 1969 he became a founding member, along with artists such as Takis and Hans Haacke, of the Art Workers’ Coalition, which resolved for artists to take more social and political responsibility. It campaigned for New York’s museums – in particular the Museum of Modern Art – to have a more inclusive exhibition policy towards female artists and artists of colour, and successfully pressured MoMA and other museums into implementing a free admission day.
In 1970 Andre was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. There, on the ground floor, he laid his 37 Pieces of Work: a huge square of metal plates in six materials (aluminium, steel, copper, zinc, lead, magnesium) which filled the atrium with its presence and challenged visitors’ preconceptions of minimalist art as being dry or dull.
Andre sold a lot of work at this time, including three pieces to the Tate. Their initial showing passed without reaction, but after a Sunday Times piece in 1976, drawing attention to the taxpayers’ money spent on the bricks, the furore was enormous. According to the Tate director Nicholas Serota: “For a long time afterwards the Tate was rather less ambitious in its acquisitions.”
Throughout this decade and the next, Andre continued to experiment in materials. “The periodic table of elements is for me what the colour spectrum is for a painter,” he said. “My ambition as an artist is to be the Turner of matter.”
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, fuelled by heavy drinking on both sides. Andre claimed to remember nothing of the events leading up to Mendieta’s death. While he suggested that she might have fallen while trying to close a window, or that she might have thrown herself in an act of suicide, many of Mendieta’s friends and followers believed he either intentionally pushed her, or that she fell while the pair were fighting.
Andre’s friends, dealers and investors stood by him throughout and after the trial, but Mendieta’s remained convinced he was guilty even after his acquittal, suggesting that not all the evidence had been put before the court. While he continued to work, show and sell, in particular in Europe, where the case had had less publicity, anger grew among feminist art groups in New York.
In 1992, 500 protestors organised by the Women’s Action Coalition gathered outside the SoHo Guggenheim after an Andre sculpture was included in its inaugural show, holding a banner that said: “Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta?” Three years later the feminist activists the Guerrilla Girls issued a poster describing Andre as the OJ Simpson of the art world. Andre did not respond. “I’m a rather phlegmatic person,” he said. “Rather stoic. I learned well as a child, when I would sometimes be bullied. I was a fat child.”
However, the attention on Mendieta’s death only grew over time, along with her stock as an artist, and the campaign group Whereisanamendieta, named after that initial slogan, continued to raise awareness. At the opening of the Tate Modern extension in 2016, the group held a loud demonstration over the omission of Mendieta’s work – and the inclusion of Andre’s – in the new building.
In 2013 Andre had a major retrospective at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which travelled internationally, including to the Turner Contemporary, Margate.
He was married first to Barbara Brown, a teacher, and secondly to Rosemarie Castoro, a painter. In 1999 he married Melissa Kretschmer, an artist. She and his sister, Carol, survive him.
• Carl Andre, artist, born 16 September 1935; died 24 January 2024
