The adventures of Jo Baer: in a wide-ranging discussion, the artist touches on her beginnings as a painter in California and New York, explains some of the fine points of her best-known works, and hints at new directions - Interview

Born Josephine Kleinberg in Seattle in 1929, Jo Baer attended the University of Washington (1946-49), where she majored in biology. While there, she enrolled in a few art classes. Following a short first marriage and a six-month stint on an Israeli kibbutz, she relocated to New York City (1950-53). Baer resumed coursework in science at the New School for Social Research and its Graduate Faculty in Gestalt Psychology and sat in on a drawing class. Returning to the West Coast in 1953, she settled in Los Angeles, marrying television writer Richard Baer. Three years after their son Josh was born in 1955, the couple divorced. In the late 1950s, she taught herself to paint, experimenting with a variety of approaches before electing a reductive, hard-edge style.

In 1960, Jo Baer moved back to New York with her new husband, painter John Wesley. She began the series that the dealer Richard Bellamy titled the "Koreans" two years later. In 1964, Dan Flavin included her work in the landmark Minimalism show "Eleven Artists" at the Kaymar Gallery, and Dan Graham invited her to participate in the opening show of his Daniels Gallery. Her work then encompassed series of large squares, small squares and vertical and horizontal rectangles with fully enclosing borders. In 1966, she painted flanking and stacked diptych and triptych groupings. "Stations of the Spectrum," six paintings with gray grounds, and the "Double Bar" series with gray backgrounds followed over the next two years.

In New York, she participated in such historic exhibitions as Lawrence Alloway's "Systemic Painting" at the Guggenheim Museum, "10" at Dwan Gallery in 1966, and "Art in Series" at the Finch College Museum in 1967. New York's Fischbach Gallery mounted her first solo show in 1966. Two years later, she showed in Documenta IV. In 1969, the year she and Wesley divorced, she began experimenting with wraparound paintings with diagonal and curved forms, sometimes called the "Radiator" paintings because they are objectlike and mounted near the floor.

Several months after the Whitney Museum organized a retrospective of her paintings in 1975, Baer moved to Ireland, relinquishing abstraction to work with metaphoric images in a style she had begun in New York. In 1982, she relocated to London, and two years later she settled in Amsterdam. The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, mounted a retrospective in 1977, as did the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1999. The Paley Levy Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, presented her new work in 1993, and the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands, showed both recent image work and Minimalist canvases that same year. She is currently represented by Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam.

Judith Stein: Every artist has to make work and manage a career, which are two quite different things.

Jo Baer: Yes, apparently I have always been an artist's artist. When I had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1975, Tom Armstrong told me that I broke all attendance records on free-admission night, when students and the really interested people come, but that nobody bought the catalogue. In other words, I have the best audience in the world, which is other artists, and I've always ranked very highly with them, but I don't do well in the market. It's a great compliment, in fact.

JS: Perhaps it's one of the privileges of being underknown that when someone does bring your work back to a wider audience, as the Dia Center has done now with an exhibition of your work from the 1960s and '70s, it conveys new meanings and confounds the forces that strive to simplify art history.

JB: Well, I'll disappear again--being female, especially--but I'll come back every 15 years, because my work lasts.

JS: Let's talk about disappearing. Your career was at its height when you left the U.S. to live abroad in 1975. What went into your decision to leave?

JB: I didn't like the pressures of New York. People want you to keep doing exactly what you've already done, because it makes money. Once you've got a trademark, you're recognizable, and they want you to stay that way. So I knew the best thing to do was to get out. I just assumed that, since I'd had a lot of exposure, my good dealers, Dick Bellamy and Klaus Kertess, would be able to sell my work. Well, Klaus sold a couple things, and Bellamy sold nothing. So within a few years, I was stuck with no money. This has been one of the problems--out of sight, and out of mind.

JS: So it was to take some of the pressure off that you moved abroad?

JB: I wanted to develop a new kind of work, with images, and I knew I could not do that in New York. Also, the people who were working with images at that time were dumbing down very fast. So I wanted to see what I really thought, from a distance. It wasn't meant to be career suicide, it just turned out that way. I started being left out of the big international shows.

JS: You were included in Documenta IV in 1968.

JB: And I've never been in a Documenta since. Initially, Kasper Konig was going to include a reprise of my 1966 debut at Fischbach in the big German survey "Westkunst" in Cologne in 1981, but he changed his mind. I'm told he felt that I was "no longer committed to that work." The art community saw me as a turncoat.