Judd, Donald

Judd, Donald (1928–1994). American sculptor, designer, and writer on art, one of the leading exponents and theorists of Minimal art. He was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and after serving with the US Army in Korea, 1946–7, he studied in New York at both the Art Students League and Columbia University. In 1953 he graduated in philosophy at Columbia and he gained an MA in art history there in 1962 ( Meyer Schapiro was one of his teachers). From 1959 to 1965 he earned his living as an art critic, working mainly for Arts Magazine. He began his career as a practising artist as a painter, producing what he later called ‘half-baked abstractions', but in the early 1960s he took up sculpture with heavily-textured monochrome reliefs. In 1963 he began making the type of work for which he is best known—arrangements of identical rectangular box-like shapes cantilevered ladder-like from a wall. He called these sculptures ‘specific objects’ and in an article of this title (first published in Arts Yearbook, 1965) he championed such work on the grounds that ‘actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface'. Initially he worked mainly in wood, but after a successful exhibition at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1963–4 he began having them industrially manufactured in various metals (or sometimes coloured perspex). In 1970 he began making works for the specific space in which they were to be exhibited, and in 1972 he began producing outdoor works. In spite of great financial success, Judd (who was notoriously touchy) disliked the New York ‘art crowd’ and in 1973 moved to Marfa, Texas, where he converted the buildings of an old army base into studios and installation spaces. In the 1980s he began designing furniture in a similar style to his sculptures. Collections of his writings were published in 1976 and 1987. See also ARTFORUM.