It was early 1976. Britain was racked by austerity. The pound was falling, oil prices rising, there was double-digit inflation and the IRA was carrying out frequent bombings. Distraction came in the unlikely form of the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) and 120 identical sand-coloured firebricks, neatly laid out 10 in length, six in width and two in height.
The work of US artist Carl Andre, these bricks – then untitled, now known as Equivalent VIII – caused arguably the greatest public outcry ever witnessed in the British art world, to the consternation of the Tate’s employees and the ribaldry of the general public. “The furore rumbled on for weeks, then months, it was the cultural outrage of the year,” recalls Nick Comfort, who covered the story for The Telegraph.
“It was quite a phenomenon. Some people were puzzled by the bricks, but many were genuinely outraged,” says Richard Morphet, then a Tate research assistant, later keeper of the gallery’s modern collection.
For months, the question of whether a pile of bricks (or, as Morphet points out, “actually a carefully arranged set of bricks”) was art and, if so, should taxpayer’s cash be splurged on it, replaced football, television and pop music as the hottest debate topic in pubs up and down the country.
“These days, piles of bricks seem so familiar, but this was before the likes of the Turner Prize. Modern art was very much a minority interest and this all seemed very cutting edge,” says Robert Cumming, a professor of art history at Boston University, who was then in the Tate’s education department.
American artist Andre (right) with Equivalent VIII at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1978 – Jeff Baynes/Chris Morphet/Getty Images
Alongside the likes of Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin, Andre was a leading member of the then-new minimalist movement, which emphasised purity of form for its own sake over representation of the outside world. Keen for a piece of the action, the Tate purchased Equivalent VIII in 1972 for £2,297 (around £27,000 in today’s money), out of the £500,000 of its government acquisitions allocation.
Twice it was put on display yet – despite staff’s best efforts to garner press interest – attracted zero attention. But then, in early 1976 The Sunday Times published an article about some of the gallery’s recent additions, illustrated by the bricks. The following day, the Daily Mirror printed a photo of the bricks with the headline: “What a load of rubbish.”
Fleet Street unanimously piled in. “I call it a pile of bricks and that’s what it is,” Bernard Levin pronounced in The Times; the Mirror dispatched reporters to interview bricklayers about their “work”, announcing: “The great new art movement known as low sculpture spread to Britain’s more discerning building sites yesterday.”
When the row erupted, the bricks weren’t even on display. Norman Reid, the Tate’s director, ordered them to be brought out of storage and the Tate – already hosting the biggest Constable exhibition in history – was mobbed by what The Telegraph described as “a large and irreverent crowd”.
The 1976 edition of The Telegraph
“I think the middle-aged and the elderly thought the bricks were rubbish, but the young were probably inclined to say, ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ because it was new,” says Cumming. “There were photographs of people lying on the floor, saying, ‘But it’s a low sculpture.’ Low sculpture, my foot! It was just a pile of bricks. But then I was young and foolish and more willing and enthusiastic to defend it than I would be now.”
Reid argued the gallery was simply ahead of its time: “Some of [the Tate’s] purchases will appear incomprehensible or perhaps offensive to some visitors in the same way that Constable’s work was widely attacked in his own day,” he said.
A man lies on the floor for a closer inspection at the Tate in February 1976 – Pictorial Parade/Getty
Within weeks of the sculpture going on display, Peter Stowell-Phillips, a chef and amateur artist from Clapham, south London, expressed his displeasure at what he saw as both a poor piece of art and a waste of taxpayer’s money by donning a three-piece pinstripe suit to throw blue food dye over them, to – he claimed – bystanders’ applause. “I most definitely do not regret doing it,” he told the BBC for its 2016 documentary Bricks. The Tate did not press charges but banned Stowell-Phillips for life. “People weren’t used to vegan types and pro-Palestinians throwing things at paintings then, so it was very shocking,” Comfort recalls.
The bricks were removed for cleaning and Reid resolved to keep them off display for a period, saying: “I was hoping people would begin to understand a little what it was about, but it will take longer than a few days.” Staff were outwardly loyal, yet some muttered that the acquisition had been ill thought-through. After all, as its name suggested, Equivalent VIII was only one in Andre’s Equivalent series of eight sculptures of brick stacked two deep in rectangular piles, shaped differently but each containing 120 bricks – hence “equivalent”.
“I think my curator and colleagues misunderstood what they were buying. They thought the bricks had aesthetic value when in fact it was a very American, very boring, abstract mathematical thing showing the physical manifestation of 120, which is considered a special number because its factors are one, two, three, four, five, six… But that idea was completely lost because they only bought one set,” says Cumming.
Reid was shaken by the outcry. Sandy Nairne, later director of the National Portrait Gallery, then working as a Tate researcher, recalls that for a long while after the bricks scandal, “horns were drawn in and there were many fewer contemporary acquisitions of a more ambitious nature for a long time”.
The bricks sparked endless mockery – but also creativity. Gregor Muir, the Tate’s current director of collection, then a schoolboy, recalls watching BBC’s current affairs programme Nationwide as a child and seeing “a huge outpouring of public ideas about what the Tate could buy from them”. He says: “I distinctly remember someone sending in a Polaroid of a coffee cup in a saucer balancing on the corner of a filing cabinet, saying it was available for sale. It was a sort of community art project that galvanised a response and got the public very much involved, and it left a mark on me.”
Decades later, in a London taxi heading to meet Andre for dinner, Muir asked the cabbie if he had heard of him. “I was expecting a typical cabbie’s response, but he said: ‘That work was quite mathematical.’ He seemed to know more about it than me.”
As events unfolded, the hirsute Andre, the son of a marine draughtsman from Massachusetts – who said the bricks’ inspiration came after a canoeing trip made him want to create sculpture that was flat like water – remained in New York. He declined an interview with BBC News, reasoning that “the temptation to make a fool of myself would have been enormous”. Later, he compiled a selection of press cuttings on the affair, placing each in its own ruled oblong box. “I think he, like everyone, was rather amazed by the sheer scale of the outrage,” recalls Morphet.
Andre’s final years were dogged by scandal after he was charged with – and acquitted of – the murder of his wife, Ana Mendieta – Tate
Andre died in 2024, aged 88, having been dogged by a more serious scandal. He married the acclaimed sculptor, painter and performance artist Ana Mendieta in 1985 and, eight months later, she fell to her death from their New York apartment window. Andre was charged with murder but acquitted, to the displeasure of many, who subsequently demonstrated outside his exhibitions. Today his works are displayed in – variously – New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, with an average estimated value of around £2.5m.
In Muir’s opinion, subsequent developments in British art more than vindicated their purchase. “They marked the beginning of Britain’s very rare and precious public engagement with contemporary art, we’re very invested and intrigued by it. Deep down they got people thinking about what their relationship was with this art, whether they liked it or not, and they were primed for things like Damien Hirst’s shark in a way that was quite unusual and that ultimately led to the opening of the Tate Modern. The original controversy’s a memory, but the sense of what it represented is still strong.”
