Painter Jo Baer, who was best known for hard-edged 1960s abstractions, but who was also a well-regarded writer about her own work and other artists, died on Tuesday at 95. The artist had signed on in 2019 to Pace Gallery, which announced her death.

“Jo Baer was a visionary painter who made a name for herself in the male-dominated New York art world of the 1960s,” Pace’s president, Samanthe Rubell, said in a statement. “As one of the truly great practitioners of Minimal Abstraction, she shook the very definition of painting with her revolutionary canvases. Working closely with Jo, I was always struck by her strength and fearlessness—and her ability to reinvent herself and her approach to painting over the course of her career. Jo’s power will be deeply felt in Pace’s program and community for many years to come.”

Jo Baer, The Risen (Big-Belly) (1960-1961/2019). © Jo Baer, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Baer started out as an abstractionist in Los Angeles, from 1957 to 1960. She then moved to New York and painted in a Minimalist vein from 1960 to 1975, after which she moved to the countryside in Ireland and to Amsterdam in 1984, where she spent her remaining years. The Dutch had been, she said in a 1995 Bomb magazine interview, “exceedingly nice” to her in terms of mounting exhibitions, museums collecting her work, and giving her grants.

Baer was born Josephine Gail Kleinberg on August 7, 1929, in Seattle to a commodities broker father and an artist mother. She majored in biology at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1946 to 49 with a plan to be a medical illustrator, but dropped out to marry a fellow student, a relationship that soon ended.

She traveled to a kibbutz in Israel before settling in New York from 1950–to 53, where she did coursework for a master’s degree in psychology at the New School for Social Research. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she met and married television writer Richard Baer. Their son Joshua Baer became an art dealer, writer, and consultant. They divorced in the late 1950s. While in California, Baer met and befriended artists including Ed Kienholz and others associated with the Ferus Gallery. She was married to painter John Wesley from 1960 to 70; the couple, along with Joshua, moved to New York, where Baer would stay until 1975.

Jo Baer, Untitled (1964/65). © Jo Baer, courtesy Pace Gallery.

In 1960, Baer moved from Abstract Expressionism to hard-edged abstraction. In a 1971 text published in Flash Art, she wrote, “Non-objective painting’s language is rooted, nowadays, in edges and boundaries, contours and gradients, brightness, darkness and color reflections. Its syntax is motion and change.” She was included in key group exhibitions of Minimalist artists including “Eleven Artists,” organized by Dan Flavin in 1964, and “Systemic Painting” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York two years later.

Baer’s first solo exhibition was at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966; she also had exhibitions over the years with galleries like Galerie Rolf Ricke in Cologne; Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles; Lisson Gallery, London; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; and Gagosian Gallery, Geneva.

In a 1983 Art in America article, she proclaimed that she was no longer an abstract artist. As she recalled in Bomb:

None of the Europeans understood that I wasn’t attacking the process of abstraction; I was merely saying that we have to broaden what we do as artists, and that making installations, spreading out in space, is not the way to make things different. I adore being a painter because it’s in one place. It has so many traditional aspects, you can forget about new technologies unless you need them. And you can work out really complicated ideas in painting. It’s easy to make an object that’s desirable. I see a lot of “good” sculpture in that sense, desirable objects that I don’t mind looking at. I see very few good paintings.

She then moved into what she called “radical figuration,” which she clarified in Bomb as being not about working in any one genre but rather “using images to convey meanings.”

Jo Baer, Dusk (Bands and End-Points) (2012). © Jo Baer, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Her paintings appear in institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main. Numerous institutions have mounted solo exhibitions of her work, including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Camden Arts Centre, London. 

She also appeared in major group exhibitions, including Documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968); the Site Santa Fe biennial (2002); the Busan Biennale in South Korea (2012); the Sao Pãolo Biennale (2014); and the Whitney Biennial (1973 and 2017).

Jo Baer, Snow-Laden Primeval (Meditations, on Log Phase and Decline rampant with Flatulent Cows and Carbon Cars) (2020). © Jo Baer, courtesy Pace Gallery.

The artist’s auction market for her classic minimalist compositions is on the rise; her top price, of $327,600, was achieved at Christie’s New York in 2023, for an untitled canvas from 1963. Nine works have sold for six-figure sums, all since 2007, all but one of them for paintings from the 1960s.

Baer was also active as a writer, publishing a text in the “Systematic Paintings” catalogue, the Art in America essay, an essay in Aspen magazine, and other articles in Art International, Flash Art, Studio International. Many of her writings were brought together in the 2010 book Broadsides & Belles Lettres: Selected Writings and Interviews 1965–2010.