Carl Andre, the minimalist sculptor whose life’s work was overshadowed by accusations that he had murdered his third wife, has died aged 88.
The artist was a pioneer of minimalism, and famed for austere works such as 1966’s Equivalent VIII, an arrangement of 120 fire bricks on the gallery floor. But he was also notorious for being a suspect in the murder of Ana Mendieta, who fell from the couple’s apartment window after an argument in 1985. Despite being acquitted of second-degree murder in 1988, the accusations continued to follow Andre for the rest of his life, with supporters of Mendieta turning up to protest at his exhibitions.
Andre was born in 1935, growing up in Quincy, Massachusetts before studying art at the state’s Phillip’s Academy. As a child he marvelled at the rusting sheets of steel and huge blocks of granite that lay around the shipyard where his father worked. Despite being what he once described as a “terrible painter … a hopeless drawer”, he found his metier with sculpture, crafting things out of scraps of metal he had found in the New York railway yard where he worked as an engine driver.
He got his break when the Tibor de Nagy Gallery invited him to show his work, and soon became renowned as one of the founders of minimalism due to his stark and often severe creations.
His 1969 work 144 Magnesium Square was just that, the thin plates each measuring 12 by 12 inches arranged in a square formation on the floor. Spectators were not used to works designed to be experienced horizontally. Lever (1966) consisted of 137 bricks placed in a straight line, slicing through whichever space it was installed in. As well as these works with rough materials, Andre also produced multiple visual poems during his career. In 1970, the Guggenheim Museum staged the first retrospective of his work.
Despite critical attempts to interpret his sculptures, Andre always stressed that the pieces had no “meaning” behind them and instead arose solely from the sensuality of the materials. Not everyone was convinced. Equivalent VIII arrived in the UK after being purchased by the Tate in 1972, and a few years later the Daily Mirror ran a front page headline declaring: “What a load of rubbish.” The work has since acquired a second moniker as the “pile of bricks”.
In 1979, Andre met Mendieta who had fled Cuba for the US where she gained a reputation in her adopted country as an “earth-body artist”. The pair married in 1985, the same year Mendieta would fall to her death. In a call to the emergency services at the time, Andre claimed that she had fallen after an argument, and he was found to have scratch marks on his nose and arms. Later he would give a different account to police, saying that she had gone to bed alone and that he had later discovered her gone with the window open.
Andre’s lawyers insisted that Mendieta’s death was either accidental or due to suicide. Yet despite his subsequent acquittal, Mendieta’s supporters ensured that her death became a feminist cause. In 1995, feminist art collective the Guerrilla Girls put up posters in New York featuring posters of Andre alongside OJ Simpson with the words: “What do these men have in common?”
Such accusations did not, however, seem to derail Andre’s career. In 2013, he appeared in the Venice Biennale and his works are in the collections of multiple museums including New York’s MoMA and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He was still making large-scale sculptures as recently as 2021 with 5VCEDAR5H which consisted of red cedar blocks arranged alternately upright and on their side against a white wall.
In a statement, the Paula Cooper Gallery, which represented Andre, said: “Carl Andre redefined the parameters of sculpture and poetry through his use of unaltered industrial materials and innovative approach to language. He created over 2,000 sculptures and an equal number of poems throughout his almost 70-year career, guided by a commitment to pure matter in lucid geometric arrangements.”
Andre is survived by his fourth wife, artist Melissa Kretschmer, and his sister Carol.
