Jo Baer Best Known For Her Hard-Edge Minimalist Paintings Dies Aged 95

Jo Baer Best Known For Her Hard-Edged Minimalist Paintings, Dies Aged 95

Jo Baer, the celebrated American painter who revolutionised Minimalist abstraction before charting a bold course into figuration, has died at 95. Pace Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2019, confirmed Baer’s passing on 21 January.

Born Josephine Gail Kleinberg in Seattle, Washington, in 1929, Baer’s career was encouraged by her mother, she studied biology at the University of Washington to become a medical illustrator, taking her first painting and drawing classes along the way. Later, she pursued graduate studies in psychology at New York’s New School for Social Research while working as a draftsperson for an interior design studio.

In 1953, Baer moved to Los Angeles and married television writer Richard Baer, with whom she had a son, art consultant Josh Baer. After her divorce, she married and later divorced painter John Wesley, a partnership that coincided with her full-time dedication to painting and a relocation to New York in 1960.

In New York, Baer emerged as a leading figure of the Minimalist movement. She created black-and-white, hard-edge paintings that explored the interplay of form, colour, and spatial relationships. Her work, characterised by its geometric precision and restrained palette, treated the canvas as an object in its own right, challenging traditional notions of painting.

Her prominence grew during the 1960s and 70s as she exhibited alongside contemporaries like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. Baer’s work was featured in the groundbreaking 1966 Systemic Painting exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and in Documenta in 1968. The Whitney Museum of American Art honoured her with a mid-career retrospective in 1975, cementing her place in the canon of Minimalist art.

Jo Baer, The Risen (Big-Belly)
Jo Baer, The Risen (Big-Belly) Photo Courtesy Pace

In 1975, Baer left New York for Europe, seeking an environment less hostile to women and less commercially driven. Her artistic practice underwent a profound transformation as she moved from Minimalism toward “radical figuration,” blending abstract forms with figural elements, text, and symbols. She explained her departure from Minimalism: “I wanted more subject matter and more meaning.”

Baer lived and worked in Ireland and London before settling in Amsterdam in 1984, where she remained until her death. Her later works, including fragmented images and layered symbolism, defied categorisation and reflected her unyielding commitment to artistic evolution.

Baer’s work is in significant collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate in London. Her influence has been celebrated in key group exhibitions, such as the 2017 Whitney Biennial and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at MoMA.

Her most recent exhibition, Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants, was held in 2023 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. It showcased the enduring relevance of her work.

Pace Gallery president Samantha Rubell paid tribute to Baer’s legacy, describing her as “a visionary painter” and highlighting her strength and fearlessness in navigating a male-dominated art world.

Baer’s writings and reflections on art, compiled in Broadsides and Belles Lettres: Selected Writings and Interviews 1965-2010, offer insight into the mind of an artist whose originality and defiance of convention shaped the course of modern art.

Her gallery wrote the following statement:

Pace is deeply saddened to announce the passing of artist Jo Baer on January 21 at age 95.
Over more than 60 years, Baer pushed the formal and experiential possibilities of painting into radical new directions. In the 1960s and 1970s, her groundbreaking hard-edge paintings were included in many landmark exhibitions of work by New York minimalists, including Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim Museum and 10 at the Dwan Gallery in 1966. Shortly after her 1975 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the artist moved to Europe, where she would explore new painting approaches, gradually adding figural elements, text, images, and symbols to her work.

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