Matthew Levy

This dissertation undertakes a critical reappraisal of Minimalism through an examination of three key painters—figures who have historically been considered lesser participants in a predominantly sculptural movement. By establishing these artists’ substantive engagements with minimalist discourse, this project builds on recent revisionist efforts to posit Minimalism as a polemical field, one in which painting was a particularly fraught subject. In addition to recuperating the literalist dimensions of these painters’ practices, it also historicizes and challenges the period’s “death of painting” critiques that have been so influential to theories of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts.