Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965‐1975

This is Donald Judd (1928‐1994), sometime art critic and one of the founders of the movement that came to be known as “Minimalism”, ruminating on an exhibition held in Connecticut in 1964 which featured “boxes on the floor”. Carter Ratcliff’s book suggests that the establishment of this movement provoked a torrent of avant‐garde artistic activity in the USA during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as artists came to perceive the clarity and inexpressiveness of “the minimalist object”, and the gallery space in which it tended to be exhibited, as exercising an “imperious authority”.

In the course of 22 chapters...