How art went back to basics

Primary Structures was a watershed. When the show opened at the Jewish Museum in New York on 27 April 1966, it helped usher in a generation of artists who raised fundamental questions about the nature and purposes of three-dimensional art. The “younger American and British sculptors” referred to in the show’s subtitle were “impelled to test primary definitions and basic aesthetic issues”, as the curator, Kynaston McShine, wrote in his catalogue essay. They were imp