Background
Carl Andre was born on September 16, 1935, in Quincy, Massachusetts, United States, into the family of George H. Andre and Margaret M. (Johnson) Andre.
Kenyon College in Ohio
Phillips Academy in Andover
Carl Andre was born on September 16, 1935, in Quincy, Massachusetts, United States, into the family of George H. Andre and Margaret M. (Johnson) Andre.
Carl completed primary and secondary schooling in the Quincy public school system. After school, Andre briefly attended Kenyon College in Ohio, but soon dropped out. Then he studied art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Master of Arts from 1951 to 1953.
Carl Andre spent a few months working in Quincy, and between 1955 and 1956 he completed his military service at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. In 1957 he moved to New York with the intent of devoting more time to writing poetry and making art. Living in Lower Manhattan, his circle of friends included Hollis Frampton and the painter Frank Stella, both of whom had also attended Phillips Academy. Frampton introduced Andre to the poetry and essays of Ezra Pound, and it was through Pound that Andre became increasingly interested in the work of the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. Stimulated by the Romanian modernist, Andre began to experiment with found blocks of wood, sawing and carving them into simple geometric shapes.
Andre's approach to art-making was strongly influenced by the example of Frank Stella. At the end of the 1950s Stella was gaining increasing recognition for his "Black Paintings", a series of works which consisted solely of uniform parallel bands of black enamel paint. Both Frampton and Andre were fascinated by the disciplined, workmanlike manner in which their friend painted: in their mind this was a technique which left little scope for artistry. Andre described Stella's technique as "constructivist" as a means of emphasizing that he built up his work from a combination of "identical, discrete units," and Andre's Pyramid sculptures from 1959 might be considered an important early attempt to produce work in a similar fashion.
It was, however, not through sculpture but with words and text that Andre continued to explore the ramifications of a "constructivist" technique. In fact between 1960 and 1964 Andre made few sculptures. During these years he worked as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad and had little space or money for producing three-dimensional art. Instead he started to "construct" poems from words or phrases which he judiciously selected from particular texts. He would then write down these fragments, arranging them on the page according to a pre-ordained protocol, such as by word-length, or alphabetically, or following a simple mathematical system. Many of these poems were produced using a typewriter, and since the late 1960s Andre has frequently exhibited the manuscripts of these text-based works alongside his mature sculptures.
Andre was well on his way to 30 before any of his sculptures were exhibited publicly, although the relative obscurity he had enjoyed up to that point had afforded him ample time to read and experiment widely. Therefore when opportunities to exhibit did start opening up from 1964 onwards, Andre had already refined a trajectory for his art which would later come to appear impressively coherent. By the mid 1960s he was already well equipped with a startlingly articulate rationale for his work, and it was largely thanks to this that he found himself able to establish his reputation with a level of self-assurance that was breathtaking.
By 1966 Andre had decided that his sculptures would develop no further. He explained to the critic David Bourdon, in Artforum in October 1966, that his very early work could be described as "sculpture as form", since it had involved cutting and shaping materials. After that he had progressed to "sculpture as structure" - a stage in which he produced works not by cutting or shaping, but by stacking up identical units. The three sculptures, "Coin", "Crib", and "Compound" (all 1965), made from nine-foot Styrofoam beams that Andre exhibited at the de Nagy Gallery in 1965, might be considered examples of the latter: each work exemplified a different building construction technique. Yet from 1966 onwards, Andre explained that he had dispensed with both form and structure, and that by laying units horizontally along the ground his work became solely the manifestation of "place." In 1967 Andre began to make sculptures using quarter-inch metal plates, and "sculpture as place" became synonymous with work which stretched out horizontally over the plane of the ground.
Since the mid 1960s the underlying premises of Andre's art have remained practically unchanged, inasmuch as the procedure for making the work has not altered. This has meant that Andre's work tends to display a range of distinct characteristics which make it instantly recognizable. For instance, much of his mature sculpture is extremely low-lying, undermining all traditional associations about sculpture's relation to the upright human body. When you stand in front of one of Andre's metal floor-based works, there is no form which "faces" you. Instead you are often permitted to walk over his metal sculptures, and stand in the space where sculptural substance usually resides.
Over the years Andre has produced a wide variety of families of works, using many differing materials and configurations. For instance, when he has used thick blocks of cedar, or cubes of granite and limestone, or especially shiny metals, the results can look opulent and grand. Yet on other occasions he has made sculptures from cheap, almost worthless materials, including scavenged objects such as bent, rusty nails, or lengths of plastic tubing. In fact, even sculptures made from the same type of unit can look entirely different depending on how Andre chooses to install them. For example, three plates of copper pushed up against the wall in a shadowy corner of a gallery would look entirely different to thirty-three plates of the same material, laid out into a rectangular formation and set right in the middle of the room. To a casual observer, all Andre's work might look very similar, but Andre wants viewers to slow down and focus on small, subtle differences - and to reflect on these.
In 1969 Andre became closely associated with the New York-based Art Workers' Coalition. The group lobbied the city's major public galleries for increased artists' rights and an end to sexism, racism and oppression within the art world. It was arguably during this period that Andre's eminence among fellow artists and North American and Western European art institutions was at its highest.
However, in 1985 his artistic reputation was severely damaged by a tragic event in his personal life. His then wife, the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, fell to her death from their New York apartment window. Andre was arrested for her murder, and, although he was fully acquitted in 1988, he became a hate figure for those who were close to Mendieta. In their eyes he came to personify many of the oppressive, establishment values against which he and the Art Workers' Coalition had campaigned in the late 1960s.
Douglas Fir Stacked El
8 cortes
Douglas Fir Fin (view 2)
Trabum
Am Am Not Am Not Willing
Untitled
Douglas Fir Rank
Douglas Fir Mini Fin
Douglas Fir Trough
Lament for the Children
11th Copper Sum
Belgica Blue Field
144 Aluminum Square
Last Ladder
Douglas Fir Large Horizontal Rectangle
Passport
Equivalent VIII
37th Piece of Work
Sum Roma
Carl Andre, Fall
Douglas Fir Step
Douglas Fir Mini Rank
Stone Field Sculpture
Douglas Fir Small Horizontal Rectangle
Douglas Fir Fin
Cedar Tango
Personal Structures
Words men word court proofs years hair men cell
Poem
Belgica Blue Field
Cedar Piece
Concrete Poem
Belgica Blue Field
Personal Structures
Douglas Fir T Abutting U
Spatial Specificity
Spill (Scatter Piece)
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Cascade
Corduroy Road
Almole
From Map of Poetry
Chain Well (Element Series)
Magnesium-Zinc Plain
Douglas Fir Rank (view 2)
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Copper Galaxy
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Chinati, December
Steel Magnesium Plain
Largely because his work is so low-lying and always presented on the ground, his work can often seem extremely unobtrusive. This is a quality which Andre has also cultivated. He has never been interested in making vast, monumental works which dwarf the viewer. Instead, Andre has often said that he likes to make sculptures which you can be in the same room with, but ignore if you choose to.
Andre claims that his sculpture is an exploration of the properties of matter, and for this reason he has called himself a "matterist." Some people have seen his art as "concept based," as though each piece is merely the realization of an idea. But for Andre, this is mistaken: the characteristics of every unit of material he selects, and the arrangement and position of the sculpture in its environment, forms the substance of his art.
In 1979 Andre first met artist Ana Mendieta through a mutual friendship with artists Leon Golub and Nancy Spero at AIR Gallery in New York City. Andre and Mendieta eventually married in 1985, but the relationship ended in tragedy. Mendieta fell to her death from Andre's 34th story apartment window in 1985 after an argument with Andre. There were no eyewitnesses. A doorman in the street below had heard a woman screaming "No, no, no, no," before Mendieta's body landed on the roof of a building below. Andre had what appeared to be fresh scratches on his nose and forearm, and his story to the police differed from his recorded statements to the 911 operator an hour or so earlier. The police arrested him.
Andre was charged with second degree murder. He elected to be tried before a judge with no jury. In 1988 Andre was acquitted of all charges related to Mendieta's death. Carl Andre is currently married to the artist, Melissa Kretschmer. They live in New York.