Jo Baer, an admired painter who exchanged the severe abstraction that made her name for a heady mix of dream imagery and deep historical references, died on Jan. 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 95.

   Beginning in 1960, when she moved to New York, Ms. Baer became one of the handful of artists developing Minimalism. In the early 1970s, she moved her work to sculpture and paintings in brightly colored designs.

“People want you to keep doing what you’ve already done because it makes money,” she said in a 2003 interview. “Once you’ve got a trademark, you’re recognizable, and they want you to stay that way.”

In her later years, she studied Greek, collected orchids, and spent the better part of a year as the chatelaine of a sprawling Norman castle in County Louth, Ireland. There, she found the austerity of her early Minimalism, unsatisfying. “I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,” she said in a 1987 interview. “There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn’t just want to sit there and draw straight lines.”