Regularity

== The Grid in Modern and Contemporary Art ==

== The Grid in Modern and Contemporary Art ==

In the 1960s and 70s, artists moved away from the raw emotion of abstract expressionism, the dominant current of the 1950s. Newer movements such as op-art and minimalism, and the continued line of constructivism in Europe engendered a body of rational, calculated visual art that utilized even spacing and grids to define order. A tour through any major American modern art museum will reveal Frank Stella canvas' of regular lines, Ad Reinhardt's hard-edge grids of barely distinguishable tones, Carl Andre's grids of metal arranged on the floor, Donald Judd's regularly-spaced steel fabrications, Dan Flavin's neon matrices, and Agnes Martin's exquisite, subtle grids of paint on canvas. This list could continue for pages and move forward in history, but you get the point. This American tendency to move toward minimal forms was expressed well by Ad Reinhardt's in Art-as-Art in 1962:

In the 1960s and 70s, artists moved away from the raw emotion of abstract expressionism, the dominant current of the 1950s. Newer movements such as op-art and minimalism, and the continued line of constructivism in Europe engendered a body of rational, calculated visual art that utilized even spacing and grids to define order. A tour through any major American modern art museum will reveal Frank Stella canvas' of regular lines, Ad Reinhardt's hard-edge grids of barely distinguishable tones, Carl Andre's grids of metal arranged on the floor, Donald Judd's regularly-spaced steel fabrications, Dan Flavin's neon matrices, and Agnes Martin's exquisite, subtle grids of paint on canvas. This list could continue for pages and move forward in history, but you get the point. This American tendency to move toward minimal forms was expressed well by Ad Reinhardt's in Art-as-Art in 1962: