Jo Baer, a painter who exchanged the severe abstraction that made her name for a heady mix of dream imagery and deep historical references, died on Tuesday at her home in Amsterdam. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by her son, Josh Baer, who said she had bladder cancer and other ailments.
Beginning in 1960, when she moved to New York for the second time, Ms. Baer became one of the handful of polemical artists who were developing Minimalism. She sparred with the sculptors Donald Judd and Robert Morris over the merits of their respective media, both in person and in the pages of Artforum. In 1966 her work was included in the influential exhibitions “Systemic Painting,” at the Guggenheim Museum, and “10,” at the Dwan Gallery, and she had her first solo show, at Fischbach Gallery.
Her diptych “Horizontals Flanking, Large, Green Line,” which appeared in the Guggenheim show and which the museum later acquired, was typical of her work at the time. In it, two identical flat white fields are surrounded by a thick black border. A thin green line between white and black — the paintings’ most important feature, according to Ms. Baer — adds an extra visual pop.
Other Baer paintings might use vertical bars instead of the all-around border or replace white with a carefully modulated gray. But all of them were just as rigorously stripped of anything that might evoke the sensual, emotional approach of 1950s-era Abstract Expressionism.
After a midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1975, however, Ms. Baer left nonrepresentational art behind, along with New York City and, to a significant extent, her position in the art world.
In Ireland, England and finally Amsterdam, where she settled in 1984, Ms. Baer took up the figure, finding inspiration in cave paintings and ancient history. In collagelike compositions with off-white backgrounds and long, sometimes obscure titles, she painted horses, architecture, women and men, natural features, and the occasional sexual situation.
In “The Rod Reversed (Mixing Memory and Desire),” from 1988, a faint blue woman and a songbird caught in midflight hang beneath what looks like a Japanese temple. In “Moonstruck Armageddon (Meditation, on Predators and Prey),” from 2019-20, a series of sheep-faced female figures emerge along a colorful spiral, gaining detail and definition as they grow larger.
Ms. Baer explained her apparent about-face in a typically pugnacious letter, which Art in America published in 1983 as part of an issue looking back on the abstraction of the 1960s.
“Modern avant-garde art died in the seventh decade of the 20th century,” the letter begins. And though its argument, about the diminishing returns of abstraction and its conceptual progeny, is highly technical, Ms. Baer’s conclusion was not: “I am no longer an abstract artist.”
Josephine Gail Kleinberg was born on Aug. 7, 1929, in Seattle to Hortense (Kalisher) Kleinberg, who had earlier worked in fashion, making drawings for Vogue magazine in New York, and Lester Kleinberg, a commodities trader.
“When I was about 11 or so, she enrolled me in an art school,” Ms. Baer said of her mother in a 2003 interview with Art in America. “But instead of getting to do landscapes and figures like the other students, I was put in another room and made to draw crabs or lobsters that she brought in for me to render. My mother had told them that I was going to be a medical illustrator, because there was a lot of money in it, and we were starting me early.”
Ms. Baer was married three times: to Gerald L. Hanauer, whom she met while studying biology at the University of Washington; to the screenwriter Richard Baer; and to the painter John Wesley. She also lived and worked collaboratively with the British artist Bruce Robbins in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
In addition to her son, an art adviser and the publisher of an art-market newsletter, she is survived by two brothers, Lester Kleinberg Jr. and Dr. Henry Kleinberg; and a granddaughter.
After the breakup of her marriage to Mr. Hanauer, Ms. Baer moved to New York for the first time, to study psychology at the New School for Social Research. In 1953, she tried Los Angeles, where she met Mr. Baer, made friends with the painter Ed Kienholz and began painting in an Abstract Expressionist style. She and her son moved back east with Mr. Wesley in 1960.
Her early New York work was similar to Mr. Wesley’s — hard-edge and minimal, but representational, and funny, with allusions to gender politics. “Glass Slippers,” 1960, features a pair of black pumps arranged sole to sole in an arrowhead-like shape, as if one were a reflection of the other.
But soon she was coming under the influence of Jasper Johns’s flags and stars and making work more similar to Frank Stella’s or Robert Mangold’s. Her paintings appeared in a show organized by Dan Flavin at Kaymar Gallery and in the first show at the artist Dan Graham’s John Daniels Gallery, both in 1964.
In the early 1970s, Ms. Baer pushed her work in the direction of sculpture, painting stark but brightly colored designs around the edges of canvases that she hung near the floor. She also published a scientific essay on the visual effects of stripes called “Mach Bands.”
Eventually the pace of the New York scene, and the demands created by her success within it, helped persuade her to leave.
“People want you to keep doing what you’ve already done, because it makes money,” she explained in the 2003 interview. “Once you’ve got a trademark, you’re recognizable, and they want you to stay that way.”
Though she never quite recovered the heat she had had in New York, Ms. Baer’s later career had its successes, too. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam gave her a career survey in 1999, and the Dia Center for the Arts in New York gave her another three years later. In 2019 she joined Pace Gallery, where her first show, in 2020, included both new paintings and reconstructions, from photographs, of work she had destroyed in the 1960s.
With the hindsight of later years, Ms. Baer became more inclined to find a through line in her own career. She noted a consistency in her use of color and questioned the kind of dogmatic separation of abstract and representational art that she and her peers had once taken for granted.
But the truth may be as simple as that Ms. Baer, an uncompromising woman who also studied Greek, collected orchids and spent the better part of a year as the chatelaine of a sprawling Norman castle in County Louth, Ireland, just found the austerity of early Minimalism unsatisfying.
“I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,” she said in a 1987 interview. “There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn’t just want to sit there and draw straight lines.”
