From the Elgin marbles to Carl Andre’s bricks: the mistakes that have made great art

One day in 1959, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre was putting the finishing touches to an abstract sculpture in wood. The work, entitled ‘Last Ladder’, was carved on only one side. When he had finished, Andre’s friend the painter Frank Stella walked in, ran his hand down the smooth reverse side and remarked, ‘You know, Carl, that’s sculpture too.’

For Andre it was a eureka moment. In a flash, he realised that he did not need to carve his sculptures at all. The materials themselves, he suddenly saw, were cutting into space. From then on his sculpture has consisted of materials such as metal plates and firebricks, piled or laid on the floor. Thus began one of the most celebrated careers in contemporary art — or infamous ones, if you are not an admirer of Andre’s ‘Equivalent VIII’, otherwise known as the ‘Tate bricks’ and for a while in the 1970s the most vilified piece of avant-gardism in the world.