Jo Baer, Pioneer of Hard-Edged Abstraction, Has Died Aged 95
A key figure of Minimalist painting, the artist radically challenged the limitations of the canvas
A key figure of Minimalist painting, the artist radically challenged the limitations of the canvas

Jo Baer, who was a key protagonist of the minimalist painting movement in 1960s New York, has died age 95. She is survived by her son, the art dealer and consultant, Josh Baer.
Born Josephine Gail Kleinberg in 1929 in Seattle, Washington, Baer attended the University of Washington from 1946–49, where she took drawing classes but majored in biology. After a brief first marriage, she moved to New York in the early 1950s before settling in Los Angeles, where she married the TV writer Richard Baer. After they divorced, Baer taught herself to paint, making what she called in a 2023 interview with Mark Godfrey ‘Fake de Kooning[s], Fake Still[s], Fake Rothko[s] and so on’.
Baer moved to New York in 1960 with her third husband, the painter John Weasley. It was there that she honed her style, borrowing from Pop Art in works such as in the Robert Rauschenberg-eque Black Star (1960) before forgoing representation entirely in favour of geometric painting in bold, contrasting colours.
Baer destroyed many of the early works she made in New York, which she felt that the art world wasn’t ready for. ‘I'd just come from Los Angeles ... And I looked around and I didn't see anything anywhere near anything like this,’ she told The Brooklyn Rail in 2020. For ‘Originals/Risen’ (2020), her double show at Pace Gallery in New York, Baer remade the five paintings she destroyed and presented them alongside photographic portraits of herself with the originals.
After the ‘Risen’ paintings, the artist created a series of white canvases with black bands that came to be known as the ‘Koreans’. As with her earlier series, the ‘Korean’ paintings divided opinion. After the dealer Ivan Karp saw them in 1963 while working at Castelli Gallery in New York, he told her that they were the most aggressive paintings that he had ever seen, and that he couldn’t imagine anyone buying one.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, Baer was included in several landmark exhibitions on minimalism, including the Dan Flavin-curated show ‘Eleven Artists’ (1966) at Kaymar Gallery, where she was the only woman in an artist list that included Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt, and ‘Primary Structures’ (1966) at the Jewish Museum, New York.
Writing about an exhibition of Baer’s works made during this period for frieze, Dan Fox said that her paintings 'reward the patient, lingering gaze.’ By making use of the sides of the canvas, he argued, ‘they encourage the viewer to take multiple perspectives on the painting: in shifting position, you shift the relationship of elements and colours to each other.’
In 1975, Baer left New York, living in a medieval castle in Ireland until 1983. After three years in London, the artist finally settled in Amsterdam in the mid-1980s. During this period, she moved away from abstraction, declaring that she was ‘no longer an abstract artist’ in a 1983 Art in America article. Speaking to Brian Evans White in 2009, Baer said of this shift, ‘I wanted to expand what I was doing; I wanted to expand my audience; I had a terrible feeling about the art elite.’
For these ‘image-based’ paintings, which often depicted animals, landscapes and female figures, Baer drew from a variety of sources, working with found imagery that she collected and placed in dialogue using tracing paper and, in later years, Photoshop. In a 2014 interview with critic Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Baer called these works ‘abstract paintings made with images’ and rejected the idea that a paintings ‘should represent or illustrate a concept.’
The artist continued working and exhibiting until the end of her life. In 2022, she had solo exhibitions at Dia Beacon, New York, and MAMCO Geneva. Her works are in numerous collections across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.
Main image: Jo Baer, Snow-Laden Primeval (Meditations, on Log Phase and Decline rampant with Flatulent Cows and Carbon Cars) (detail), 2020, oil paint on canvas, 172 × 153 cm. Courtesy: © Jo Baer and Pace Gallery