Ronald Bladen - Minimalism
Ronald Bladen (1918- 1988) was an American painter and sculptor. He is particularly known for his large-scale sculptures. His artistic stance, was influenced by European Constructivism, American Hard-Edge Painting, and sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi and David Smith. Bladen in turn had stimulating effect on a circle of younger artists including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and others, who repeatedly referred to him as one of the ‘father figures’ of Minimal Art.
Bladen began his artistic career as a painter in San Francisco, where he had moved in 1939 from his native Canada, and participated in the active community of poets and other artists there. He moved to New York in 1956. In the early 1960s he experimented with collage and relief sculptures. By 1965 Bladen’s work expanded dimensionally when he began making room-size sculptures of simplified geometric shapes. These wood constructions had smooth, painted exteriors that masked complexly engineered scaffolding hidden within the forms. Bladen’s earliest sculptures of this type were multicolored; Untitled (Three Elements) inaugurated a series of starker, mature works. It was included in Primary Structures, a landmark exhibition of minimalist art at The Jewish Museum in New York, where it was first shown publicly in 1966.
