ABSTRACT: PROFILE of artist Carl Andre. Although the Paula Cooper gallery shows his work regularly, Andre has not had a one-man exhibition at a New York museum since 1970, and his name, as a key figure in the development of minimal art, is no longer prominent in the critical discourse. The drought is easing, though, and it will come to an end in March, 2013, when a retrospective exhibition of Andre’s work opens at the Dia Art Foundation museum, in Beacon, New York, and then travels to a number of as yet unnamed museums here and in Europe. It is hard to think of an artist whose career has been so affected by circumstances that have nothing to do with his art. In Andre’s case, the precipitating event was the death of his third wife, Ana Mendieta, a young artist who fell from the bedroom window of Andre’s apartment, on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise on Mercer Street, in the early-morning hours of September 8, 1985. Andre was charged with murder, indicted, and eventually acquitted in a non-jury trial, but Mendieta’s family and many of her friends in the art community and the feminist movement believe that he was responsible for her death. For several years after his acquittal, Andre spent a lot of time in Europe, where the tragedy seemed to have no effect on his reputation. European museums continued to show his work, and sales to museums and private collectors there helped to offset the almost total disappearance of his American market. Wherever Andre was, he kept working. Andre has described himself as the first post-studio artist. He has never needed a studio, because the materials he works with—four-by-four timbers, bricks, one-foot-square metal plates, cut or natural stones, and other available hardware—are ordered from suppliers and assembled by Andre on the site. Andre does not carve, or model, or weld, or transform his materials. His great innovation was to assemble the elements of his simple, linear sculptures on the floor, without joining them together. Other contemporary sculptors had done away with pedestals and the vertical axis, but Andre’s reorientation of his work to the horizontal plane, where it functioned not as an object but, in his words, “as place,” was more radical and more influential than anything being done by Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, or the other minimalist artists in the nineteen-sixties. Writer visits Andre and his wife, Melissa Kretschmer, at their apartment. Tells about Andre’s childhood in Massachusetts, his education at Phillips Academy, and his friendship with Richard Serra. Andre discusses his memories of the night Mendieta died.
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