In the late 50s, Tony Smith and Barnett Newman helped to remodel Betty Parsons' 57th Street gallery. They created an almost cube-shaped main space - the walls pure as a page, with subtly curved corners and a concrete floor - whose proportions fitted their ordered works. These two artists were the linchpins of Minimalism, influencing such artists as Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Richard Nonas and Sol Lewitt, all of whom were interested in human artefacts and in alternative descriptions of art. Andre called his works 'arrangements'. Rooms were called 'spaces'. Curators called the new art - which more than ever before drew attention to the 'space' - 'primary structures' (Kynaston McShine), 'literalist' (Michael Fried), 'systemic' (Lawrence Alloway), and 'Minimal' (Richard Wollheim).
Experiencing New York art through magazines, in 1963, Californian John McCracken cut a notch in his sign-oriented abstract paintings on Masonite and began to inch his way from Newman toward Smith. He began to paint on blocks of wood, and in 1966 made his first lacquer-covered 'plank', an eight-feet tall blue and red board that linked the wall to the floor and seemed to wed West Coast colour with the severe, literal and systematic East Coast Minimal works he had read about.
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