In seventeenth-century England and New England, communities influenced by Puritan thought developed what later came to be called the Plain Style — an approach to making that valued simplicity of form and honesty in materials. Ornament was treated with suspicion. What mattered most was the integrity of the object: how it was made, how it functioned, and whether its form expressed its purpose without excess.

This ethos continued in later communities shaped by similar values. In the craftsmanship of groups such as the Shakers, objects were produced with a remarkable economy of means. Their furniture, tools, and buildings are often admired today for their striking simplicity, but that simplicity was not conceived as an aesthetic program. It was the practical outcome of a moral and spiritual discipline that regarded unnecessary display as a distraction from the work itself.

When artists in the 1960s reduced sculpture and painting to basic forms and materials, they did so within the framework of modern art theory. Yet the underlying intuition echoes principles that had guided makers centuries earlier in the Plain Style. Recognizing this lineage is to see Minimalism as a continuation of a broader cultural ethic that aligned material practice with moral clarity. Minimalism gave this impulse a name, but the Plain Style had already given it a way of life.

This lineage mirrors my own trajectory. I grew up within a fringe Protestant denomination originating in the early nineteenth-century Plymouth Brethren movement, where sobriety and simplicity were values guiding worship and everyday conduct. Only later, when I became involved in art, did I encounter Minimalism and realize that it embodied principles I had already absorbed.

Harmen Brethouuwer