In 1917 Marcel Duchamp placed a used urinal on its side in a gallery space and named it Fountain. Two years earlier Vladimir Tatlin made a work from common materials that depended on the corner of the gallery space for support. Some thirty years later John Chamberlain took mangled car parts and presented them as sculpture. At the same moment, Robert Rauschenberg was perusing city streets for cast off household goods to include in his Combines. Modernism changed the way sculpture was being made, approached and considered. This lecture will explore important works from the early 20th century that challenged how we think about art and in so doing created an environment that encouraged a handful of artists to work toward the pure primary objects that became Minimalism.