Donald Clarence Judd

Donald Clarence Judd 1928-94, American artist, b. Excelsior Springs, Mo. His sculpture, allied with the minimalist school of the late 1960s (see minimalism ; modern art ), has the appearance of industrial fabrication. He used rectangular forms fashioned from painted wood, polychrome, or steel in equally spaced, repeated units. The artist eschewed any relationship to the larger world in his works, preferring to leave them untitled. Examples of his work are in the Whitney Museum, New York City and many other public institutions. In the 1970s, Judd acquired a number of massive buildings and tracts of land in Marfa, Tex., where he established the Chinati Foundation, which exhibits his own works and those of other minimalists, as well as related art.

Judd, Donald (b Excelsior Springs, Mo., 3 June 1928; d New York, 12 Feb. 1994). American sculptor, designer, and writer on art, one of the leading exponents of Minimal art. 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, 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 boxlike shapes cantilevered ladder-like from a wall. 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 started 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. His Complete Writings, 1959–75 was published in 1976, and Complete Writings, 1975–86 in 1987.