The rise
Through much of the 1950s, the dominant art movement in the United States was Abstract Expressionism. The expressionist artists seeked to express their personal emotions through their art.
A highly popular branch of Abstract Expressionism was called Action Painting. This was a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas (source).
In the early 1960′s, a new movement emerged; Minimal Art. The Minimalists felt that Action Painting (and as such, Abstract Expressionism) was too personal, pretentious and insubstantial. They rejected the idea that art should reflect the personal expression of its creator (source). Instead, they adopted the point of view that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself (source). Their goal was to make their works totally objective, unexpressive, and non-referential.
One of the first painters to be specifically linked with Minimalism was (the former Abstract Expressionist) Frank Stella. Stella’s instantly acclaimed minimalist Black Paintings (1958-1960), in which regular bands of black paint were separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas (source), contrasted the emotional canvases of Abstract Expressionism (source).
The most prominent theorists were Donald Judd, who wrote the manifesto-like essay “Specific Objects” in 1964 (download) and Robert Morris, who wrote the three part essay “Notes on Sculpture 1-3″ in 1966 (download).