Carl Andre Biography
Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist who is recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. The sculptures range from large public artworks such as Stone Field Sculpture, 1977 in Hartford, CT and Lament for the Children, 1976 in Long Island City, NY to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space such as; 144 Lead Square, 1969 or Twenty-fifth Steel Cardinal, 1974.
In 1988, Carl was tried and acquitted in the death of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.
Carl Andre Age
Carl is 83 years old as of 2018. He was born on September 16, 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts, United States.
Carl Andre Wife | Carl Andre Ana Mendieta
In 1979, Carl met Ana Mendieta through a mutual friendship with artists Leon Golub and Nancy Spero at AIR Gallery in New York City.
In 1985, he and Mendieta eventually married but the relationship ended in tragedy. In 1985, after an argument with Carl, Mendieta fell to her death from Andre’s 34th story apartment window. There were no eyewitnesses but 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.
Carl on the other side, 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.
Carl was arrested and later charged with second degree murder. He later elected to be tried before a judge with no jury and in 1988 he was acquitted of all charges related to Mendieta’s death.
Carl Andre Art
Carl’s early work in wood may have been inspired by Brâncuși, but his conversations with Stella about space and form led him to a different direction. Carl developed a series of wooden “cut” sculptures (such as Radial Arm Saw cut sculpture, 1959, and Maple Spindle Exercise, 1959) while sharing a studio with Stella.
Carl worked as freight brakeman and conductor in New Jersey for the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1960 to 1964 and the experience with blue collar labor and the ordered nature of conducting freight trains would have a later influence on Carl’s sculpture and artistic personality. For example, it was not uncommon for Carl to dress in overalls and a blue work shirt, even to the most formal occasions.
There is very little notable sculpture on record that was worked on by Carl between 1960 and 1965 as he mainly focused on writing. In a book published in 1980 by NYU press called 12 Dialogues, Carl’s poetry resurfaced. In the book, Carl and Hollis Frampton took turns responding to one another at a typewriter using mainly poetry and free-form essay-like texts. Carl’s concrete poetry has exhibited in the United States and Europe, a comprehensive collection of which is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
In 1965, Carl had his first public exhibition of work in the Shape and Structure show curated by Henry Geldzahler at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In the seminal 1966 show at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled Primary Structures, Carl’s controversial Lever was included.
In 1969, he helped organize the Art Workers Coalition while in 1970 he had a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Britain’s Tate Gallery, in 1972, acquired Carl’s Equivalent VIII, an arrangement of firebricks. The piece was exhibited several times without incident, but in 1976, it became the center of controversy after being featured in an article in The Sunday Times and later being defaced with blue food dye. This “Bricks controversy” became one of the most famous public debates in Britain about contemporary art.
Carl Andre Equivalent VII | Carl Andre Bricks
Equivalent VIII is occasionally referred to as The Bricks and is the last and most famous of a series of minimalist sculpture by Carl. The exhibit comprises of one-hundred-and-twenty fire bricks, arranged in two layers, in a six-by-ten rectangle. All of the eight structures in the series have the same height, mass and volume, but different shapes, thus they are all “equivalent”.
It was constructed in 1966 and was bought by the Tate Gallery in 1972 for $6,000 (then £2,297), half of the 1966 price.
Carl Andre Poems
To read or download any of Andre’s poems, click here.
Carl Andre Artwork
Some of Carl’s known artworks are;
- 144 Lead Square
- Hour Rose
- Steel Aluminium Plain
Carl Andre Interview
BARBARA : I want to begin at the beginning, Carl, because I’m trying to reconstruct the remembrance of things past.
ANDRE: That’s wonderful, but my mind has been destroyed by alcohol. I hope you understand that.
ROSE: Well, that was true when I met you. Do you remember when and where we met?
ANDRE: Yes! I was with [cinematographer] Michael Chapman. We were walking south on Broadway and you were walking north. We were supposed to meet and I said, “How will I recognize her?” And Michael said, “She’s the one who walks like a drunken sailor.”
ROSE: Michael used to say things to me like, “You have no sense of yourself.” And he was absolutely right.
ANDRE: But who wants a sense of oneself?
ROSE: I’m trying to conjure up the atmosphere of that time—except we weren’t in any sort of atmosphere. We were more out of the atmosphere.ANDRE: Oh, let’s not talk about youth!
ROSE: Why? I thought it was fun.
ANDRE: It was fun! That’s why it’s painful!
ROSE: I remember we were all so broke, there was a great deal of scrounging. We had a ritual once you were gainfully employed. Every week, Michael and I would borrow $5 from you, and then we’d pay you back, and then on Monday we would borrow it back again.
ANDRE: That was around 1958, when I was making $30 a week working at the publishing company Prentice Hall. Prentice Hall was the cheapest place in the world. I quit because I was one day short to qualify for a vacation. So I said, “I’m getting out of here.”
ROSE: I remember the day you resigned. You came over and you threw your tie on the floor.
ANDRE: And my shirt and my pants and my underwear…
ROSE: No, just the tie. You stomped on your tie and said, “I resign from the middle class!”—which I thought was a good idea, because we weren’t in it anyway.
AN ARTIST, to ACHIEVE ANYTHING IN ART, HAS TO finally DO THE THING THAT NOBODY ELSE WANTS TO DO and NOBODY ELSE HAS THOUGHT TO DO. Carl Andre
ANDRE: You know how I got that job? I studied English grammar with Major LeVey in the Army. Major LeVey was a leading scholar in medieval Spanish ballads. I was in the “525 military intelligence school.”
ROSE: Didn’t you also plot movements of people on maps during the Army? I think you wrote letters to Michael about that. I remember when you got out of the Army and showed up at our door with a buzz cut. You were somewhat rotund then.
ANDRE: Oh, I’ve been fat, thin, fat, thin, fat, thin …
ROSE: This was more of a rotund moment. And you said, “I have my mustering-out pay. It’s $600 and we must spend it immediately!” We went to Times Square for two or three days and saw, I don’t know, six movies a day, and between the movies we drank.
ANDRE: Champagne!
ROSE: And after those six days you said to Michael and me, “I’ve spent my mustering-out pay …”
ANDRE: “And now you must take care of me.”
ROSE: And I thought, “How did this happen? I’m already taking care of Michael and now I have Carl!” I was 19 or 20, it’s the year 1957, and I don’t know who or where I am yet. I had no money. I was in graduate school and working odd jobs. Michael was writing short stories. He was a wonderful writer. He had been Lionel Trilling’s protégé at Columbia. I had no idea what you were going to do because you dropped out of college.
ANDRE: I would have dropped out of the Vatican if I were a cardinal.
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