34 Facts About Jo Baer

Josephine Gail Baer was an American painter associated with minimalist art.

Jo Baer began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s.

Jo Baer's mother, Hortense Kalisher Kleinberg, was a commercial artist and a fierce proponent of women's rights who influenced her daughter's views on independence.

Jo Baer's father, Lester Kleinberg, was a successful commodities broker in hay and grain.

Jo Baer studied art as a child at the Cornish College of the Arts, but because her mother wanted her to become a medical illustrator, she majored in biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, which she attended from 1946 to 1949.

Jo Baer dropped out of school in her junior year to marry a fellow-student at the university, Gerard L Hanauer.

The marriage was over quickly, and in 1950, Jo Baer went to Israel to explore the realities of rural socialism on various kibbutzim for a few months.

Jo Baer went to school at night, while during the day she was employed by an interior design studio as a draftsperson and secretary.

Jo Baer moved to Los Angeles in 1953 and shortly afterwards married Richard Jo Baer, a television writer.

Jo Baer met the painter John Wesley, to whom she was married from 1960 to 1970.

She, Wesley, and Joshua moved to New York in 1960, where Jo Baer lived until 1975.

In 1960 Jo Baer rejected Abstract Expressionism for spare, hard-edge non-objective painting.

Jo Baer then introduced an even more pared-down format: the image was excised and the central area of the canvas became completely white.

In 1962, Jo Baer began the Korean series, a group of sixteen canvases.

The Koreans were given their name by the art dealer Richard Bellamy, who said that Jo Baer's paintings were just as unknown as Korean art was to most Westerners.

In many works that Jo Baer created between 1964 and 1966, the peripheries and edges of the canvas continued to be marked by two square or rectangular bands of color.

Jo Baer was accepted as a peer in the burgeoning Minimalist movement by such artists as Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin.

Jo Baer included Baer, along with Judd, Flavin, LeWitt, Ward Jackson, Frank Stella, Irwin Fleminger, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Robert Ryman, Leo Valledor, and himself.

Jo Baer participated in "10," a group exhibition at the Virginia Dwan Gallery co-curated by Ad Reinhardt and Robert Smithson that further enshrined its participants as canonical for Minimalism.

Jo Baer's works shown in these exhibitions, which included vertical and horizontal single, diptych, and triptych paintings, established her avant-garde reputation in the New York art world.

Jo Baer then turned them into triptychs because she saw that these paintings had more wall power when they were hung together.

Jo Baer was an active writer during her years in New York.

Jo Baer tackled the physics and psychology of visual perception in her discussion of Mach bands, an optical illusion named after Ernest Mach, a nineteenth-century physicist who discovered that light-dark contrasts will intensify when opposing colors are placed next to each other: light areas will appear lighter and dark areas will seem darker.

Jo Baer linked this investigation into subjective sensations of the beholder to how edges, boundaries, and contours are experienced in modern art.

In 1975, Jo Baer was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, showcasing her Minimalist work.

Jo Baer needed a distance from New York's art world, and in June 1975, she moved to Smarmore Castle, a manor and working farm with a Norman keep, in County Louth, Ireland.

Jo Baer began to paint quasi-figuratively, layering fragments of images of animal, human bodies, and objects in muted, translucent colors.

Jo Baer drew on erotic images found in early cave paintings, Paleolithic sculptures, and fertility objects to create compositions that suggested palimpsests.

In 1977, Jo Baer had a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and during the course of it she met the British artist Bruce Robbins.

Jo Baer chronicled "abstraction's demise," and in characterizing its meaninglessness in a vastly changed world, claimed openness, ambiguity, "metaphor, symbolism, and hierarchical relationships" as necessary building blocks of modern works.

Jo Baer announced that she and Robbins were working toward a "radical figuration" based on those constructs.

In 1984, Jo Baer moved by herself to Amsterdam, where she lived until her death.

Jo Baer died in Amsterdam on January 21,2025, at the age of 95.

Jo Baer had bladder cancer at the time of her death, and was survived by her son Josh, an art dealer and consultant.