Jo Baer facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jo Baer
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Baer in 2014
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| Born |
Josephine Gail Kleinberg
August 7, 1929 Seattle, Washington, U.S.
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| Died | January 21, 2025 (aged 95) |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Minimalism |
| Awards | Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) Jeanne Oosting Award (2016) |
Josephine Gail Baer (born August 7, 1929 – died January 21, 2025) was an American painter. She is known for her minimalist art. She started showing her paintings in New York in the mid-1960s.
In the mid-1970s, she changed her style, moving away from abstract art. Later, she combined images, symbols, words, and phrases in a new way, calling it "radical figuration." Jo Baer lived and worked in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Contents
Early Life and Artistic Beginnings (1929–1960)
Josephine Gail Kleinberg was born on August 7, 1929, in Seattle, Washington. Her mother, Hortense Kalisher Kleinberg, was an artist and a strong supporter of women's rights. She taught Jo about being independent. Her father, Lester Kleinberg, was a successful broker who traded hay and grain.
As a child, Baer studied art at the Cornish College of the Arts. However, her mother wanted her to become a medical illustrator. So, Jo studied biology at the University of Washington from 1946 to 1949. She left college early to marry Gerard L. Hanauer.
This marriage ended quickly. In 1950, Baer traveled to Israel for a few months. She wanted to learn about rural socialism on different kibbutzim (communal settlements). After returning to New York City, she studied psychology at The New School for Social Research from 1950 to 1953. She worked during the day and went to school at night.
In 1953, Baer moved to Los Angeles. Soon after, she married Richard Baer, a television writer. Their son, Joshua Baer, was born in 1955. Joshua later became an art dealer. Jo and Richard divorced in the late 1950s. During this time, Baer started painting and drawing again. She became friends with Edward Kienholz and other artists. She also met painter John Wesley. They were married from 1960 to 1970.
In 1960, Jo, John, and Joshua moved to New York. Jo lived there until 1975. After separating from Wesley, she was in a long relationship with sculptor Robert Lawrance Lobe.
Baer's early work in the late 1950s explored visual ideas similar to artists in the New York School. These included Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko. Rothko's work especially helped her think about how to use a painting's shape. Jasper Johns's art also impressed her. It showed her that a painting should be important just as it is.
Artistic Journey and Exhibitions (1960–1975)
Minimalist Paintings and Exhibitions
In 1960, Jo Baer stopped painting in the Abstract Expressionist style. She began creating simple, hard-edge abstract paintings. Two important early works in this style are Untitled (Black Star) (1960–1961) and Untitled (White Star) (1960–1961). Both are at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.
She then made her paintings even simpler. The center of the canvas became completely white. In 1962, Baer started the Korean series, which included sixteen paintings. Art dealer Richard Bellamy named them "Koreans." He said Baer's paintings were as unknown as Korean art was to most Westerners.
The Koreans paintings had a large white area surrounded by bands of sky blue and black. These bands seemed to shimmer and move. This optical illusion showed Baer's focus on "the idea of light." Baer said she was inspired by Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable. His ideas about how things pass through boundaries influenced her.
From 1964 to 1966, many of Baer's works had two colored bands around the edges. The outer band was thick and black. Inside it, a thinner band was a different color, like red, green, or blue. In 1971, Baer explained her art: "Abstract painting's language is about edges and boundaries, light and dark, and color reflections. It's about motion and change."
Baer became a respected artist in the growing Minimalist movement. Other artists like Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin accepted her work. In 1964, Flavin organized "Eleven Artists," an important show for Minimalism. It included Baer, Judd, Flavin, LeWitt, and Frank Stella.
In 1966, Baer had her first solo show at the Fischbach Gallery. This gallery was a center for new art. That same year, her work was in "Systemic Painting" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She also showed her art in "10," a group exhibition at the Virginia Dwan Gallery. This show helped establish artists like Carl Andre, Judd, LeWitt, Flavin, and Agnes Martin as key figures in Minimalism. Baer's paintings in these shows, which included single, two-part, and three-part works, made her well-known in the New York art world.
In the late 1960s, Baer experimented with color. She also changed where the viewer's eye focused in her art. For her series The Stations of the Spectrum (1967–1969), she painted over white surfaces to make them gray. She then made them into three-part paintings (triptychs) because they looked stronger together.
Next, she wanted to see "what happens around a corner." This led to her "Wraparound" paintings. In these, Baer painted thick black bands with colored edges (blues, greens, oranges) that went around the sides of the canvas. Artists usually ignore or cover these areas. Now, the action was at the edges. Baer wrote, "Sensation is the edge of things. Where there are no edges, there are no places."
To further challenge ideas about where a painting begins or ends, Baer added diagonal and curved lines of color. These lines streaked across her white paintings and down the sides of the canvas. These paintings had unusual titles like H. Arcuata (1971) and V. Lurida (1971). The titles came from a book of botanical Latin she owned. "H." meant "horizontal" and "V." meant "vertical." "Arcuata" meant curved, and "lurida" meant "pale" or "shining."
Writing About Art
Baer was an active writer during her time in New York. She wrote letters, articles, and statements in art magazines. She defended painting from sculptors who said it was no longer important. Because she spoke out against powerful artists like Judd, some of her former friends avoided her.
One of Baer's most important essays was "Art & Vision: Mach Bands," published in 1970. She used her science background to write about how we see things. She discussed Mach bands, an optical illusion. This illusion makes light areas look lighter and dark areas look darker when different colors are placed next to each other. She connected this idea of how our eyes see to how edges and boundaries are experienced in modern art.
Later Life and New Directions (1975–2025)
In 1975, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a show of Baer's Minimalist work. However, Baer felt stuck with her abstract painting style. She felt it had become too predictable. Two paintings, M. Refractarius (1974–75) and The Old Year (1974–75), show her desire to move away from Minimalism.
Baer needed a change from the New York art world. In June 1975, she moved to Smarmore Castle, a farm in County Louth, Ireland.
In this new place, her paintings changed. She started to include images of horses, birds, and people from the countryside. She began painting in a more figurative way. She layered fragments of animal and human bodies and objects. She used soft, see-through colors.
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In 1977, Baer had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. There, she met British artist Bruce Robbins. They lived and worked together from 1978 to 1984, first in Ireland and then in London. They created paintings, drawings, and writings together. Their joint works were shown in eight exhibitions.
While in London, Baer wrote a famous article called "I am no longer an abstract artist." It was published in Art in America in October 1983. In it, Baer said that abstract art no longer made sense in a changed world. She argued that modern art needed to be open, unclear, and use "metaphor, symbolism, and hierarchical relationships." Baer announced that she and Robbins were working on "radical figuration" based on these ideas.
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In 1984, Baer moved by herself to Amsterdam, where she lived until her death. In the 1990s, Baer's paintings became, in her words, "more direct." She used richer colors, sharper contrasts between light and dark, and explored cultural and social ideas more deeply.
Baer also painted about her own life. Important works include Altar of the Egos (Through a Glass Darkly) (2004) and Memorial for an Art World Body (Nevermore) (2009). A series of six works called In the Land of the Giants (2011) was shown at the Stedelijk Museum in 2013.
Over the years, Baer's writings were collected in a book called Broadsides & Belles Lettres: Selected Writings and Interviews 1965–2010. This book shares her thoughts on art and her own work.
Many museums have shown Baer's work. These include the Kröller-Müller Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Dia Center for the Arts. In 2013, two solo shows ran at the same time: "In the Land of the Giants" in Amsterdam and "Jo Baer. Gemälde und Zeichnungen seit 1960" in Cologne. Baer's art was also part of the Whitney Biennial.
Jo Baer passed away on January 21, 2025, at the age of 95.
Collections
Baer's artworks are held in many public collections around the world, including:
- Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, US
- Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, US
- Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, US
- Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, US
- Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, US
- Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York, US
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., US
- Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands
- Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, US
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, US
- Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Tate Gallery, London, UK
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York, US
- Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, US
