From Publishers Weekly
According to Baker, minimalist art is much more than a supercool pose: it is a spasm of revolt, and in its urge to clarify esthetic experience, it is rooted, he claims, in American pragmatism, with distant links to Shaker folk art and utopian social experiments like the Oneida and Brook Farm communities. Yet he notes that the "patent silence" of minimalist sculpture may be its chief value in a culture overwhelmed by trivial distractions. This readable, perceptive survey by the San Francisco Chronicle 's art critic takes a refreshingly undogmatic approach, amplified with 40 color and 80 black-and-white plates. In assessing Dan Flavin's emotionally charged fluorescents, Richard Serra's "prop pieces" on the verge of collapse, Bruce Nauman's deadpan satires, Sol LeWitt's intricate lattices suggestive of crystals or city plans, and works by Eva Hesse, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Joel Shapiro et al., Baker broadens our awareness of the many unpredictable forms the minimalist impulse can take. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This thoughtful, well-written book offers a clear, concise look at an art that reveals no personal touch but has an immediacy that challenges the viewer. Examining Minimalism's major figures--primarily the sculptors--Baker celebrates the movement's elegant relationship with the past, evident in Shaker plainness and Sheeler precisionism, and predicts its demise as Neo-Geo, simulation, and mass-produced, smugly overblown products begin to dominate. He thus traces a shift from "an art that excludes the unnecessary to a culture so overcoded and content-addled that even the most trivial and passing forms and happenings appear to carry messages." A philosophical, provocative quesioning of aesthetic values and a comment on the social, political, and economic tenor of the American art scene; highly recommended.- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum Lib., New YorkCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The San Diego Union, 3/5/89
This is not just a thorough history of the movement, but an assessment of its place in recent history as well. This book is for anyone interested in art of the '60s-and not only because it is that rare commodity: lucidly written criticism. It is important, as well, because Baker strips away conventional, accumulated judgments about the work of the key Minimalist artists and offers fresh analysis of their achievements.


San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, 3/19/89
[A] lavishly illustrated publication entirely devoted to the subject . . . a welcome study of the history of the movement, the primary artists involved and its estimable achievements. . . . Baker is cogent, humorous and direct. . . . [He] successfully restores to Minimalism its original meaning, reconstructs the context from which the movement first asserted itself and brings it to the present day.


Art & Antiques, 5/89
Baker's handsomely illustrated study confirms the beauty and diversity that can be found in even the most severely reduced forms of artistic expression.


San Diego Tribune, 12/8/89
Baker, art critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, is a wonderful writer, and his book shows extraordinary sensitivity and clear thinking about art whose power often remains elusive to many. And this small book is beautifully illustrated with 48 color illustrations.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The effects and influence of minimalism—the art movement in which artists removed personal expression and decorative detail from their work—continue to be felt today as art produced by its proponents continues to be exhibited and artists continue to use the style.

The great movements of modern art, among them Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism, have challenged rather than accommodated critics and public. None more so than Minimalism, which unrelentingly questioned not only the nature of art, but also the place of art in society-especially the capitalist society of the United States.

Beginning in the 1960s, artists like Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Eva Hesse, Robert Grosvenor, and Joel Shapiro reacted against what they saw as the flamboyance of Abstract Expressionism, seeking instead materials, forms, and procedures that explicitly do not convey the personal touch of the fabricator. Many observers have judged the artworks that resulted obstinately cerebral and unapproachable-or, worse, barren beyond the point of tedium.

Others have recognized that these works are, in fact, revolutionary, embodying an elemental immediacy unprecedented in Western art. Giving no quarter to complacent illusion and habits of perception, the Minimalists pushed aesthetic thought deeply into the crust of unexamined ideas that most of us take for granted as cultural terra firma.

In this volume, illustrated with works ranging from small-scale sculpture and hermetic paintings to vast "earthworks," Kenneth Baker, the award-winning art critic of the SanFrancisco Chronicle, explores the history and challenge of Minimalism in the context not only of the trends it succeeded, but of those that have succeeded it. Minimalism: Art of Circumstance is one of those rare essays of critical insight that combine a comprehensive point of view with a revisionist spirit; for, in unfolding the history of his subject, Baker finally challenges the very notion of a "minimalist movement." The result is provocative, and in today's wildly pluralistic post-modern art world, this volume is living history-in fact, required reading.

Other Details: 128 illustrations, 48 in full color 144 pages 8 1/2 x 8 1/2" Published 1989

Author Biography: Art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker publishes in all the major journals, including Art in America, Artforum, Architectural Digest, Connoisseur, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many others. He has received the Manufacturers Hanover Trust-Art World Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism (1985) and his Minimalism studies have been supported by the Dia Foundation. Baker has taught at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Boston College.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

According to Baker, minimalist art is much more than a supercool pose: it is a spasm of revolt, and in its urge to clarify esthetic experience, it is rooted, he claims, in American pragmatism, with distant links to Shaker folk art and utopian social experiments like the Oneida and Brook Farm communities. Yet he notes that the ``patent silence'' of minimalist sculpture may be its chief value in a culture overwhelmed by trivial distractions. This readable, perceptive survey by the San Francisco Chronicle 's art critic takes a refreshingly undogmatic approach, amplified with 40 color and 80 black-and-white plates. In assessing Dan Flavin's emotionally charged fluorescents, Richard Serra's ``prop pieces'' on the verge of collapse, Bruce Nauman's deadpan satires, Sol LeWitt's intricate lattices suggestive of crystals or city plans, and works by Eva Hesse, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Joel Shapiro et al., Baker broadens our awareness of the many unpredictable forms the minimalist impulse can take. (Mar.)

Library Journal