Linen Boxes and Slices: Raoul De Keyser and American Modernism in Belgium in the 1960s and 1970s

Before his international breakthrough shortly before the turn of the century, Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012) had a long career that reaches back to the 1960s, when he was associated with Roger Raveel and the so-called Nieuwe Visie (New Vision in Dutch), Belgium’s variation on postwar figurative painting that also entails Anglo-Saxon Pop Art and French nouveau réalisme. Dealing with De Keyser’s works of the 1960s and 1970s, this article discusses the reception of American late-modernist art currents such as Color-Field Painting, Hard Edge, Pop Art, and Minimal Art in Belgium. Drawing on contemporaneous reflections (by, among others, poet and critic Roland Jooris) as well as on recently resurfaced materials from the artist’s personal archives, this essay focuses on the ways innovations associated with these American trends were appropriated by De Keyser, particularly in the production of his so-called Linen Boxes and Slices. Made between 1967 and 1971, Linen Boxes and Slices are paintings that evolved into three-dimensional objects, free-standing on the floor or leaning against the wall. Apart from situating these constructions in De Keyser’s oeuvre, this article interprets Linen Boxes and Slices as particular variations on Pop Art’s fascination for consumer items and on Minimalism’s interest in the spatial and material aspects of “specific objects”.

Stella, Frank (1936--)

Frank Stella is a prominent American abstract artist whose deadpan aesthetic presaged Minimalism and Color Field painting. In contrast to the turbulent brushwork and improvisatory methods of Abstract Expressionism, Stella’s groundbreaking Black Paintings (1959) feature uniform surfaces and serial arrangements of forms. Born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella grounded his artistic education in non-objective painting. At the Phillips Academy, he studied with abstractionist Patrick Morgan, a pupil of Hans Hofmann. At Princeton University, he took studio courses with William Seitz, a scholar and practitioner of Abstract Expressionism; and Stephen Greene, an abstract painter and former student of Philip Guston. After graduating from college in 1958, Stella moved to New York City and produced gestural paintings of squares and stripes inspired by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns. He soon abandoned painterly textures but retained the stripe as his signature motif. Stella’s work of the 1960s continued in the vein of his Black Paintings, but evolved to include metallic and Day-Glo pigments and shaped canvases. After 1970, his paintings assumed sculptural dimensions and incorporated expressionist brushwork and exuberant arabesques. Stella has continued to develop his exploratory practice to the present day.

Reinhardt, Ad (1913–1967)

Ad Reinhardt, the American painter and illustrator-cartoonist, was born in 1913 and raised in New York City. Reinhardt attended Columbia College, pursued graduate studies in Asian art at New York University, and taught art and art history for twenty years at Brooklyn College. As a painter, Reinhardt was committed to pure abstract painting—what he termed "art-as-art." His pursuit of abstraction brought him into contact with the American Abstract Artists in the 1930s, with the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s, and with Color-field painting and Minimalism in the 1960s. The black square paintings, begun in 1960, are exemplary of his extreme formal reduction. Uniformly five by five feet and matte black, Reinhardt made these monochromatic paintings for the last six years of his life. Reinhardt was also a prolific illustrator and cartoonist. His work appeared in leftist publications such as the New Masses and P.M. and was used in support of political organizations such as the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress. His later cartoons were often directed at art-world corruption.