Donald Judd
Donald Judd
1928 - 1994
American sculptor, painter, and writer. After a mandatory term in the US Army between 1946 and 1947, Judd spent brief periods studying art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA (1948–9) and at the Art Students League in New York City (1948 and 1949). He subsequently completed a BA in philosophy (1950–53) at Columbia University and later returned to pursue, but not complete, an MA in art history (1958–60). In 1959, he began writing art criticism for publications such as ARTnews and Arts Magazine and, in the early 1960s, he was better known as a critic than as an artist. In this capacity, he became an enthusiastic supporter of artists such as Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, and Frank Stella, and many of his essays played an important part in critical debates throughout the decade and during subsequent years. After his first one-man exhibition in 1963, however, he became better known as an artist and played a central role in the development of Minimalism along with artists such as Carl André, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella.
In his early paintings, which he later termed ‘half-baked abstractions’, Judd endeavoured to simplify the compositions and eliminate the balancing of forms that he felt characterized post-war European art. In their matter-of-factness and simplicity these abstract works were a logical extension of the Colour field painting practised by American artists such as Barnett Newman. In 1962, however, he abandoned painting after concluding that it was irredeemably illusionistic, and he began a series of sculptures, or rather objects, made from materials such as aluminium, masonite, and wood. With these constructions, he not only abandoned painting, but he also dispensed with any sense of spatiality and symbolism beyond the physical presence of the object itself. This reductive approach led him increasingly towards what he later referred to as ‘specific objects’. Such objects, he claimed, avoided the categories of painting and sculpture by refusing the illusionism that he believed was inherent to both.
Between 1964 and 1966, Judd developed a vocabulary based on industrial materials, geometric forms, and repetition that preoccupied him for much of his subsequent career. The most consistent element was the box, which he presented in closed, semi-hollow, or transparent forms, and treated neutrally to refuse any symbolic connotations. In 1964, he began hiring industrial fabricators to manufacture these pieces, and this brought an immediate shift in both their technical precision and range of materials. In subsequent years, he frequently made pieces in metals such as steel, aluminium, or galvanized iron, which he often painted or combined with Plexiglas to create dazzling chromatic effects. In many of the resulting works, he pursued an interest in serial organization as either repetition or mathematical progression. He insisted, however, that this approach was sequential rather than compositional, operating on the principle of ‘one thing after another’ rather than one thing in relation to others. In some of the more celebrated of these works, he attached a number of identical boxes to the wall to form a vertical column of alternating solids and voids of equal size, as in Untitled (1965; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.; see also Untitled, 1967). In some of these pieces, the number of the units could be modulated to accommodate the dimensions of the gallery.
In the early 1970s, Judd moved to Marfa, TX, and with the help of the Chinati Foundation he acquired a large amount of land in the area (including an abandoned military installation). In subsequent years, he used the property to create a large-scale, open-air museum for his work and that of other artists, including John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Roni Horn, Richard Long, David Rabinowitch, and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Judd’s contributions to the site include an elaborate display of 100 aluminium boxes in a pair of renovated artillery sheds (1982–6) and a massive outdoor installation of 15 concrete structures (1980–84). The expansive setting of these works allowed him to explore actual space and physical presence on a scale that was not possible in his earlier gallery pieces, and they expanded on the shift from composition to context that formed the basis of his 1960s work. [Alfred Pacquement and Tom Williams. "Judd, Donald." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T045279.]
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