Robert Morris, cornerstone of post-war art, dies at 87 -ARTnews

The artist Robert Morris, whose career spans over more than half a century and embraces avant-garde dance, sculpture, land art and many other fashions, died at 87 years old. He died of pneumonia in Kingston, New York State. , was confirmed by his wife, Lucile Michaels Morris, to Ken Johnson in the New York Times.

The early works of the artist, in the first half of the 1960s, which contributed to the initiation of the language of minimal sculpture, would have been enough to ensure his place in the canon of art post-war contemporary, but he relentlessly experimented in the years to come. works with draped felts suggesting body presences, scattered art experiences and large-scale works in the form of labyrinths.

In short, the Morris corpus was protean – in a sense, representative of the evolution of the contemporary art world during its lifetime, evolving from a pattern based on a succession of competing moves to a more dispersed plurality, with varied tendencies. and styles coexist and rise and fall in fashion.

In addition to his extensive work as an artist, Morris was also an insightful and sometimes acerbic critic. He published essays on the theory of sculpture as well as the production of other artists.

Morris was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1931 and attended the Kansas City Art Institute, San Francisco California School of Fine Arts, and Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He also served for some time in the Corps of Engineers of the Army, and this military experience seems to have been taken into account in the content of some of his writings and his art.

His work has been deeply brought together by the main institutions. In 1994, the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a retrospective of his career.

An exhibition of new works by Morris is currently on display at the Castelli Gallery at 24 West 40th Street in downtown Manhattan.

A complete obituary will follow.