Danish Sixties Avant-Garde and American Minimal Art

Max Ipsen

doi:10.7557/13.1758

Authors

Max Ipsen The Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Aarhus University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/13.1758

Keywords:

Danish minimalism, Danish art and literature, 1960s,

Abstract

Denmark is peripheral in the history of minimalism in the arts. In an international perspective Danish artists made almost no contributions to minimalism, according to art historians. But the fact is that Danish artists made minimalist works of art, and they did it very early.

Art historians tend to describe minimal art as an entirely American phenomenon. America is the centre, Europe the periphery that lagged behind the centre, imitating American art. I will try to query this view with examples from Danish minimalism. I will discuss minimalist tendencies in Danish art and literature in the 1960s, and I will examine whether one can claim that Danish artists were influenced by American minimal art.

Author Biography

Max Ipsen, The Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Aarhus University

Max Ipsen is a Ph.D.-student at The Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. He is working on a dissertation on minimalism in the arts and in literature. Max Ipsen has written essays on romanticism (Hans Christian
Andersen) and on minimalism. He has published an anthology on short-short stories (Kortprosa 1990-2003) and a book on Hans Christian Andersen (Paradoksale konstruktion, with Torben Nielsen). He is co-editor of the Danish literary magazine Passage.