Founded in Germany in the late 1950s, the small Zero group represented a sensibility that soon attracted pan-European (and even a few American) adherents. Because its aims were so general, it accommodated participants who represented varied 1950s and 1960s interests, including arte povera, conceptual art, fluxus, happenings, kinetic art, minimalism, and nouveau réalisme. They generally held in common a desire to supersede the subjectivity of abstract expressionism, art autre, and Cobra by inventing forms that broke from the past to embrace a technologically embedded future of individual liberation through non-representational art. Although the final Zero exhibition took place in 1966, the participants and their ideas continued to contribute importantly to subsequent developments.
In 1957, Heinz Mack (1931–) and Otto Piene (1928–2014) held a series of informal exhibitions in Düsseldorf, attempting to bring together like-minded colleagues. The following year saw the establishment of their eponymous journal, Zero (three issues published between 1958 and 1961), which included writing by Yves Klein, as well as Mack and Piene. In 1961, Günther Uecker (1930–) joined Mack and Piene in leading the group. The name “Zero” was chosen not for its nihilistic connotations but rather because it expressed, as Piene put it, “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning.” Around 1960, Dutch artists Jan Schoonhoven (1914–94) and a few others came together as a related group they dubbed “Nul.” Among a number of important exhibitions in the early 1960s, “Nul=Zero” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam drew particular attention to the new movement.
Mack, Piene, and Uecker all trained at the art academy in Düsseldorf. Mack and Piene went on to earn degrees in philosophy from Cologne University in the mid-1950s. All three remained particularly enthralled with the possible uses of light in art. Mack, originally a painter, in the mid-1950s adopted an experimental attitude toward working with many materials, at first largely in two-dimensional works that reached toward relief in their articulated surfaces. Soon, fully three-dimensional constructions that interacted with light and sometimes incorporated kinetic aspects became his prime concern. He later designed sculptures activated by wind or water and has notably worked in the Sahara on environmental light projects. Piene worked with such unconventional materials as smoke and soot but specialized in effects of illumination and motion in art. In the late 1960s, he added “sky art,” as he dubbed it, to his repertoire. In such works as Olympic Rainbow, created for the 1972 Munich Olympics, he deployed inflatable forms across the sky. From the mid-1960s, he spent much time in the United States and in 1972 succeeded György Kepes as head of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As its leader for almost 20 years, he advanced the creation of multimedia projects for public spaces. Uecker became a close student of philosophies, such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism, which promote simplicity and contemplation. Especially drawn to repetitious ritual labor, he gave expression to this interest in works created by laborious hammering of nails, creating the relief panels and eventually fully three-dimensional sculptures that have remained a central feature of his art. The play of light across their characteristically white surfaces offers subtle effects. A meeting in 1959 with John Cage further stimulated his thinking and fostered his experimental projects involving conceptual, kinetic, and multimedia approaches.
The Nul group’s deliberative Schoonhoven achieved a particularly pure form of minimal art. Small, monochrome (most often white), low-relief panels of paper and/or papier mâché offer delicate geometric patterns enlivened by light as it falls across their surfaces. His subtle drawings, almost devoid of pictorial incident, sustain the mood. Born in Delft, he studied at the art academy in Amsterdam. Abstract artist Jan Schoonhoven Jr. (1975–), his grandson, works in Amsterdam.
Others who joined in Zero exhibitions and activities include Austrian Arnulf Rainer; Dutch artist Henk Peeters (1925–2013), a Nul organizer and theorist known for experimental uses of materials and processes, including fire; from France, Arman, Pol Bury, Jesús Rafael Soto, Daniel Spoerri, and Jean Tinguely; Italians Lucio Fontana and proto-conceptualist provocateur Piero Manzoni (1933–63); Japanese Yayoi Kusama; Spaniard Antoni Tàpies; Swiss Dieter Roth; and German American Hans Haacke.
An accomplished painter before he turned to three-dimensional work, William Zorach markedly influenced the history of 20th-century American sculpture. Preceded among American artists only by Robert Laurent (1890–1970), he directed attention to the expressive possibilities inherent in wood and stone, rejecting esthetic conventions that had persisted since the Renaissance. The direct carving that he adopted and championed generated blocky shapes, simplified forms, and varied surface textures. Attracted, as were many modernists, to alternative esthetic traditions, he cited as his inspiration what he called “great periods of primitive carving”—including works by Africans, Mesopotamians, archaic Greeks, and Egyptians. In Paris, he had met Constantin Brancusi, whose work also affected his evolution. Zorach wrote persuasively of his methods and purposes in two books and several important articles. Born Zorach Samovich in Lithuania, then within Russia, he grew up in Cleveland, where he began his artistic training before heading to New York in 1908 and then to Paris two years later. After a brief return to Cleveland in 1911, he settled permanently in New York but always summered elsewhere, usually in New England. From the early 1920s, he returned each year to Georgetown Island, near Bath, Maine, where he died. Especially during these respites from the city, he continued to paint accomplished watercolors, usually landscapes. Otherwise, from the early 1920s, he worked principally as a sculptor. Until the 1930s, he carved or chiseled his work, but later he sometimes also modeled in clay. He treated human and animal subjects, but his strong feeling for abstract form legitimized his approach even after non-representational art took center stage during the 1940s.
His artist–wife, Marguerite Zorach (1887–1968), went largely unrecognized during much of her lifetime. Nevertheless, many observers have regarded her talents as equaling or surpassing her husband’s. Like him, she ranked among leading young modernist painters early in the 20th century. But following the birth of children in the mid-1910s, she was for a time less productive, and critical attention fell away. Over the years, she also devoted considerable time to assisting her husband with studies for his sculptures. Rediscovered after her death, she soon gained new respect as feminist artists drew attention to the textile work to which she had devoted much effort from the 1920s onward. Although at the time her decorative modernist tapestries drew praise, later critics had dismissed them as craft. Only in the 1970s were these again admired as pioneering creative accomplishments. Born Marguerite Thompson in Santa Rosa, California, and raised in Fresno, in 1908 she preceded William to Paris. Upon leaving Paris in 1911, she traveled through the Middle East and Asia on her way back to California, where she spent a productive summer painting the Sierra Nevada mountains. After their 1912 marriage, the Zorachs eagerly joined the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village, while together contributing to early modernist ferment with fauve and cubist approaches to painting. A skilled printmaker as well, she continued to be productive in that medium into the 1930s. Renewing her involvement in painting during that decade, she continued thereafter to paint figurative and landscape subjects.