Young painters like Jack Youngerman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Gene Davisamong others, they tried to create a movement against the so -called «Action Painting», that branch of the Abstract expressionism which was based on intuitive and spontaneous strokes that predominated in American art from the first decade of the last century to the fifties.
This group of artists argued that it was necessary for a work of art to refer to anything but the work itself, without associating to another point of view than itself. Thus they avoided using any other visual association and They adopted simple, linear strokes and shapes, to emphasize two dimensions. With this, they thought, the spectator would achieve an immediate and pure response of the work.
In 1965, Richard Wollheim coined the term «minimalism» in his essay Minimal art. The famous British art critic, did not actually refer to the new artists, who would soon be called minimalists but to monochromatic paintings and the use that Marcel Duchamp made of ordinary objects, such as the famous urinary one, which he presented as art.
The badges of this artistic trend included geometric shapes, almost always cubic that generate metaphors, balance in their composition, repetitions, neutral surfaces and industrial materials.
Minimalism in architecture
The vertiginous social and cultural changes In the course of the twentieth century they made Minimalism became a real option in modern architecture.
Although in practice some ideas were already used such as simplicity in their concept and the reduction of their elements, the first architects that proposed minimalist works were based on the tradition of Japanese construction where the structure is reduced to its necessary elements.