Donald Judd
The boxes of Minimalism.
Donald Judd made industrially fabricated boxes in rows and stacks and set out to create “specific objects” free of illusion.
Donald Judd was born in 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. After military service in Korea he studied philosophy at Columbia University in New York and art at the Art Students League, and later art history. For several years he worked as an art critic, and his sharp reviews gave him considerable influence.
He began as a painter but felt that painting was bound to illusion, since a painting always pretends to show a space that does not exist. In the early 1960s he turned to three-dimensional work. In his 1965 essay Specific Objects he described a new kind of art that was neither painting nor sculpture but real objects in real space. He disliked the word Minimalism, but is regarded as one of the movement’s most important artists.
Judd’s works are boxes and forms in industrial materials such as aluminium, steel, Plexiglas and plywood, often fabricated by workshops to his drawings. They are arranged in rows along the floor or in stacks on the wall, with equal intervals, so that the empty space becomes as important as the forms. The colour is that of the material itself or a clear industrial paint. There is no composition with a centre, no symbolism and no trace of the hand.
From the early 1970s he lived in Marfa, a small town in the Texas desert. There he bought a decommissioned military base and created the Chinati Foundation, where art, architecture and landscape work together permanently. It houses his 100 untitled works in mill aluminium in two former artillery sheds and fifteen large concrete works out in the landscape. He also designed furniture.
Judd died in 1994. His home and studio in New York and his sites in Marfa are now open to visitors. He has been of great importance for later art, architecture and design.