Principles of Modernism: Minimalism

Quilt top from the 1970s

Minimalism is a term that describes a composition with few elements.

Sonia Delaunay

JoJo 1969

Wassily Kandinsky 

Composition VIII 1923

Modernists pushing abstraction tried to eliminate the non-essentials. Some theorized that the essentials involved only basic color and basic shapes. Basic color included the primaries: red, blue and yellow. Basic shapes were circles, squares, triangles and rectangles.

Study for an exhibit poster about the Bauhaus

by Herbert Bayer

Detail of a Mondrian painting

Piet Mondrian's work is classic minimalism.

Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 New York World's Fair

by architects Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux.

Two primary colors, two primary shapes.

Quilts often do minimalism as well or better than any artist struggling to get rid of the non-essentials.

Circles & Squares

Triangles

See a classic triangle quilt by Annie Pettway here:

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/explore/catalog/slideshow/pages/q043-03b_JPG.htm

Textile prints were also influenced by minimalism.

Sophia Loren

The  black and white polka dot is the classic minimalist print---

no color, just circles.

Designers reduced the figure to the basics.

From the Wiener Werkstatte

(Viennese Workshop)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

See more of their impressive WW collection by clicking here:

http://www.metmuseum.org/en/collections/search-the-collections?&who=Designer+Unknown%7CWiener+Werkst%C3%A4tte&rpp=20&what=Samples&pg=1

Feedsack print about 1950

More minimalism in 20th-century quilts:

Silkscreen paper print by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy

Read more about Minimalism here at the Museum of Modern Art's webpage

http://www.moma.org/collection/theme.php?theme_id=10459

And see a  page of Gee's Bend quilts, masterpieces of minimalism, at Auburn University's site:

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/geesbend/explore/catalog/slideshow/index.htm

Furniture designed by Norman Bel Geddes in 1933.

Variation with squares instead of circles.