Painter Jo Baer Dead At 95

Jo Baer, a trailblazing painter who gained accolades as a Minimalist during the 1960s before diverging from the movement later on, died on Tuesday at 95. Her death was announced by Pace Gallery, which did not specify a cause.

Across more than six decades of work, Baer found innovative—and challenging—ways of exploring how the eye perceives an image. While many artists of her generation were fascinated by similar themes, her work has repeatedly proven difficult to classify, conforming to no single movement or tendency.

At the start of her career, during the ’60s, her spare paintings seemed to share commonalities with works by Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt, leading sculptors of the Minimalist movement. But Baer differed in multiple respects: she was a painter, not a sculptor, and she was a female artist amid a group composed mostly of men. Still, as critics scrambled to make sense of her art, she was labeled a Minimalist and frequently discussed alongside these figures.

Then, during the ’70s, she broke an art-world taboo by transitioning from abstraction to figuration. Rumors spread that she had destroyed her Minimalist paintings as she formally renounced ties to the movement. In a 1983 letter to Art in America, she formally stated that she was not an abstract painter and said no one could contribute anymore to that artistic mode. “Modern avant-garde art died in the seventh decade of the 20th century,” Baer wrote.

Her unwillingness to conform may have been the reason that she was inspirational to artists who came up after her. Evidence of her youthful spirit arrived at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where her paintings looked like distant relatives of the other figurations on view. She was the oldest participant in that exhibition by several decades.

Though Baer’s figurative paintings have begun receiving their due after years of being overlooked, her Minimalist paintings have also been seen widely in recent years. When she debuted these paintings, however, they polarized critics.

Her most famous paintings of the 1960s are square canvases that Baer painted mostly white, with a dark black, along with a thin band of vibrant color—hot pink, highlighter green, blazing orange. “I understood this blank, white area as light . . . and the edges are boundaries,” she once said. Not everyone understood what she was doing, however. In a 1995 interview, she recalled, “I remember Sol LeWitt saying to me, ‘Why are you using a piece of color in there?’ I had to tell him I was a painter, that’s what painting’s about.”

She would continue distilling painting to its basics, at times also subverting traditional modes of presentation. Baer occasionally hung her paintings below eye level or showed them in close proximity, as if to call attention to the gallery space surrounding her art—a common Minimalist trope.

During the early ’70s, Baer pushed this style to its limits with a small group of paintings that took years to produce. Bearing titles referencing the orchids that Baer herself grew, these paintings, like the ones that came before them, were mostly white, though these works contained thin triangles of color on their sides. Her canvases, too, were unusually proportioned, sometimes with clipped widths but long bodies, or dramatically vertical. Baer hung some only an inch or so from the ground.

The mode of presentation, and just about everything else about Baer’s Minimalism, confounded critics. “Baer’s paintings should not be as hard to take as they apparently are,” wrote Lucy Lippard in a positive review for ARTnews in 1972. Years later, when similar works were surveyed by the Dia Art Foundation, these paintings continued to befuddle critics. In 2003, Roberta Smith called these paintings “some of the most stringent, implicitly combative monochrome paintings in the history of art.”

Jo Baer, née Josephine Gail Kleinberg, was born in 1929 in Seattle. Her mother—a professional artist whom Baer once called “very talented, but stupid”—pushed her daughter to try her hand at art before she was even a teenager, but Baer never felt herself compelled toward this field. Instead, she attended the University of Washington, where she studied biology.

She went on to spend six months on a kibbutz in Israel in 1949 before moving to New York in 1950 to attend the New School for Social Research, where she studied perceptual psychology and philosophy. She recalled plans to further her graduate studies by seeking admission to a Ph.D. program. But when she went to interview with Yale University, she saw a Matisse drawing, began to cry, and realized her life demanded a different trajectory.

In 1953, she married Richard Baer, a television writer with whom she had a son, Josh Baer, and whom she divorced later in the decade. From 1960 to 1970, she was married to the painter John Wesley.

Baer began painting in an Abstract Expressionist mode. At the same time, she began to fall in with the art crowd, befriending figures such as the art dealer Richard Bellamy. By 1960, she had committed herself to Hard-Edge painting.

Her ascent happened quickly. By the end of the ’60s, she had shown with Fischbach and Dwan, two well-known art galleries; Documenta and the Whitney Annual (a precursor to what is now the Whitney Biennial) both featured her work. In 1975, the Whitney Museum staged a survey of her art.

Yet rather than staying in the place where she was most famous, Baer departed New York for Ireland, a decision she attributed to dissatisfaction with artistic trends at the time. “The pressure of a place like New York is very strong,” she told Bomb. “I wasn’t terribly fond of the direction I saw painting going in when I lived there. It was going into its dumb mode, where the dumber your work was, the better.”

In Ireland, Baer began pursuing what she would call “radical figuration,” a style that involved relying heavily upon partial images. She said that most painters at the time where overly focused on depicting one image in space. By contrast, she wanted to merge people, places, and things. “I choose things and I structure them to get new meanings,” she explained.

In 1984, the year after she wrote her Art in America letter, Baer moved again, this time to Amsterdam, where she remained for the rest of her career. Her unusual trajectory, and her being based outside the US, may have contributed to her relative obscurity in New York. Many of her most significant museum shows in the past few decades appeared in Europe, in venues such as the Stedelijk Museum, which mounted a retrospective for her in 1999.

She remained true to her commitment to changing her own style. “I admire originality and ‘the genuine,’” she told Artnet News in 2020. “I dislike clichéd, worn-out work (abstract and otherwise).”