Josephine Gail Baer (born August 7, 1929) is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. Since then, Baer has fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Early life and work, 1929-1960 Josephine Gail Kleinberg was born on August 7, 1929 in Seattle, Washington. Her mother, Hortense Kalisher Kleinberg, was a commercial artist and a fierce proponent of women's rights who imbued her daughter with a sense of independence. Her father, Lester Kleinberg, was a successful commodities broker in hay and grain. Baer studied art as a child at the Cornish College of the Arts, but because her mother wanted her to become a medical illustrator, she majored in biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, which she attended from 1946 to 1949. She dropped out of school in her junior year to marry a fellow-student at the university, Gerard L. Hanauer. The marriage was over quickly, and in 1950, Baer went to Israel to explore the realities of rural socialism on various kibbutzim for a few months. Returning to New York City, from 1950 to 1953 she did the course work for a master's degree in psychology at The New School for Social Research. Baer went to school at night, while during the day she was employed by an interior design studio as a draftsperson and secretary. Baer moved to Los Angeles in 1953 and shortly afterwards married Richard Baer, a television writer. Their son, Joshua Baer, who became an art dealer, writer, and consultant, was born in 1955; the couple was divorced in the late 1950s. During this time Baer began to paint and draw for the first time since adolescence, becoming friends with Edward Kienholz and other local artists in the orbit of the Ferus Gallery. She met the painter John Wesley, to whom she was married from 1960 to 1970. She, Wesley, and Joshua moved to New York in 1960, where Baer lived until 1975. After separating from Wesley, she was in a long-term relationship with the sculptor Robert Lawrance Lobe. Baer's work of the late 1950s emulated paintings by members of the New York School, particularly