Minimalism and Marinara Pasta

Imagine a clean building, three floors of white walls and little to no embellishments. Throughout this building minimalist artworks are scattered. Cold metals, little color, and impeccable fluorescent light line the walls. What does this space feel like? 

Now turn the corner in one of these rooms and see four steaming plates of marinara pasta dinner being set on the table. Look out the window and see the greasy prints of children’s sticky fingertips. Run your hand along the wall and feel the indentation of a nerf football that missed the mark. What does this imagined space feel like now?

At a first glance, minimalist artwork is cold, clinical, impersonal. Artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt explicitly tried to remove the artist’s hand, ego, and emotion from the work through instructions instead of personal execution and industrial materials instead of painterly touch. Through an exploration of renowned collector Hank McNeil’s Pennsylvania home, we can see that minimalism’s apparent coldness was never the whole story. Instead the movement’s obsession with material, light, and space contained the possibility of warmth and intimacy. This short post will investigate the contradiction of minimalist ideology that McNeil created within his home, thanks to a tour of the collection by Christie’s titled, A Walk Through Defined Space: The Collection of Henry S. McNeil Jr.

Minimalism as a movement emerged in the 1960s as a kind of explosive rejection against Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Pollock and Rothko saturated their work in deep emotion and passion, the viewer could feel the gesture of the paint and strain of the artist. Minimalists, on the other hand, wanted to completely erase the artist from the picture. There was no illusion or metaphor, a white cube is simply a white cube. Without any meaning within the subject or object, the emotional weight of the piece is applied by the viewer. Andre’s floor plates are just industrial squares until you walk on them. The natural or artificial light surrounding Flavin’s work creates an engaging, dynamic piece. LeWitt’s wall drawings are a set of meticulous instructions carried out by another body entirely. Minimalist artwork is given meaning by the context of the viewer and space that surrounds it. It is precisely this dependency on context that made McNeil’s home such a radical and unlikely proving ground for the movement.

McNeil’s legacy as a curator is why this collection is truly able to shine. He is not just a collector, he is an activator. McNeil did not place these pieces into a museum for viewers to walk by, ooh and aah at, and then never think of again. Instead, he incorporated countless pieces into his personal space, activating them into living, dynamic works. In doing so, the artworks are given a new depth as their meaning is informed by interactions with the rooms, lighting, and people in the home. For example, McNeil placed the Judd stack with a large, open, skylight above, allowing the thin red plexiglass to transform into a vivid magenta that bleeds down the surrounding walls. In this choice, McNeil found the latent warmth inside a work Judd made from cold copper. There is a glorious fluorescent light by Flavin whose radiant artificial glow falls strategically onto the Andre floor piece below. In this move, the pieces work in conversation, each informing the other rather than standing as distant, isolated pieces. McNeil’s sensitivity to color and light wasn’t working against minimalism, it was finding the openings these artists had left inside their own ideology. And he was only getting started.

McNeil was strategic in his activation of the pieces, and by carefully informing them with surrounding context, he created a space that is not an impersonal building, but instead a gentle home. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of McNeil’s curatorial genius is displayed on the top floor of the home. This is the most domestic space, the furthest from anything institutional. The organic chairs and family furniture are proof of a life being lived in the space. The minimalist works don’t disappear up here, but instead seem to fit in. They become part of the rhythm of the warm, friendly house rather than awkward, cold interruptions to it. But nothing in the collection is more quietly convincing than the two Sol LeWitt wall drawings living in the children’s bedrooms. Think about what it means to grow up with a LeWitt on your wall. The drawing becomes wallpaper, a backdrop, just the ordinary. And in becoming ordinary, it does something no museum wall ever could, it trains a young eye to find meaning in line, geometry, and instruction as naturally as finding meaning in a face or a voice. McNeil wasn’t collecting as status but instead as a philosophy of life, a way of shaping how his family moved through and understood the world around them. The coldest art movement of the twentieth century became the texture of a childhood. That is McNeil’s most persuasive argument, not the Judd stack lit by a skylight, not the Flavin falling onto the Andre, but the fact that his children grew up here and remember it warmly.

McNeil’s home makes an argument that minimalism’s coldness was always only half the story. The movement’s obsession with material, light, and space was never simply intellectual. Instead it contained the possibility of something warmer, and it took a collector of genuine vision to prove it. The choice to sell these fantastic works with Christie’s can be seen as a loss because of the specific atmosphere McNeil created, but it is time for these works to be given new lives, new contexts to take on, and new eyes to inform. Perhaps the greatest thing McNeil proved is that you can set four plates of marinara pasta on a table surrounded by ten million dollars worth of minimalist art, and the room will feel like home.