Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Die Fahne Hoch! (Frank Stella)Die Fahne Hoch! (Frank Stella)Black stripes of equal width, painted in commercial enamel on bare canvas, with thin lines of raw canvas left between them. That is the whole painting, and Stella meant it that way: his remark "What you see is what you see" is still quoted as a motto for the Minimalists who followed. Stand close…0
  2. 2Anne TruittAnne TruittBorn Mar 16, 1921First, 1961, Baltimore Museum of Art Truitt's first wood sculpture looks like a short stretch of white picket fence, three uneven pickets a little under four feet tall. Unlike most of the work on this list, it lets memory in: Truitt later described asking herself what she loved and arriving at the…0
  3. 3Tony Smith (sculptor)Tony Smith (sculptor)Born Sep 23, 1912Die, 1962 A hollow steel cube just over six feet on every side, raised a little off the floor so that all twelve edges are visible. Six feet is close to the height of a tall person, and Smith knew the darker reading too, tying the size to the phrase "six feet under." What it asks is simple: stand…0
  4. 4Agnes MartinAgnes MartinBorn Mar 22, 1912Grid paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, Dia Beacon From across a room an Agnes Martin canvas can look almost blank. Walk up to it and a fine grid or a few graphite lines appear. That shift from nothing to a great deal over a few steps is what the work asks you to experience, and it only happens in…0
  5. 5Robert Morris (artist)Robert Morris (artist)Born Feb 9, 1931Untitled (L-Beams), 1965 Three identical L shapes, each about eight feet long on a side, set in different orientations. You know they are the same shape, yet they look like three different objects. That gap between what you know and what you see is the whole lesson, and it grows as you walk around…0
  6. 6Equivalent VIIIEquivalent VIIIOne hundred and twenty firebricks laid in two layers, six by ten, in a low rectangle on the floor, with no plinth. Andre asks you to look down and treat the floor as part of the sculpture, and to notice that the work is the arrangement rather than the bricks themselves. That idea is clearest…0
  7. 7John McCracken (artist)John McCracken (artist)Born Dec 9, 1934The planks, from 1966 A McCracken plank is a narrow board of a single glossy color, leaning at an angle against the wall. It touches the floor like a sculpture and the wall like a painting, and McCracken said he saw it as existing between two worlds. Notice where you place it in your head, then…0
  8. 8Sol LeWittSol LeWittBorn Sep 9, 1928Wall drawings, from 1968, MASS MoCA and Dia Beacon LeWitt began making drawings directly on walls in 1968, writing guidelines that other people, usually teams of assistants, carry out. So what you see is one realization of a set of rules, and the interesting question is how much a simple…0
  9. 9Robert RymanRobert RymanBorn May 30, 1930White paintings, Dia Beacon From the 1950s onward Ryman worked mostly in white paint on square surfaces. That removes most of what people expect to look at in a painting, color, image and even which way is up, and leaves the physical facts: how thick the paint is, how the strokes run, how the…0
  10. 10The Lightning FieldThe Lightning FieldFour hundred polished stainless steel poles set 220 feet apart in a grid one mile long and a little over a kilometer wide, on high desert in western New Mexico. The ground undulates, but the pole tips are set to form a level plane, so the grid is a perfectly regular system laid over an irregular…0