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.
