Judd, Donald Clarence

(b. 3 June 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri; d. 12 February 1994 in New York City), sculptor and founder of the minimalist movement, best known for his refined freestanding geometric sculptures made from industrial materials.

The son of Roy Clarence Judd, a Western Union executive, and Effie Cowsert, Judd was born in his grandparents’ rural Missouri farmhouse. During his youth Judd’s family moved frequently, finally settling in the mid-1940s in Westwood, New Jersey, where he graduated from high school in 1946. After serving a stint in the U.S. Army, Judd returned to New Jersey and began investigating his childhood passion for art, commuting to the Art Students League in New York City in 1948. In the fall of 1949 he enrolled in Columbia University, where he studied philosophy and graduated with honors in 1953. In the evenings he continued to take courses at the Art Students League.

Judd’s educational experience was a curious mixture: at Columbia he became interested in the empirical philosophy of David Hume, and at the Art Students League he was exposed to a curriculum that stressed representation and life drawing. In his art he would later reject outright the “illusionistic deceit” of representation in favor of an empirical, factual mode of expression. In his first one-person show at the Panoras Gallery in New York City in 1957, Judd exhibited some untitled paintings that eschewed representation in favor of an almost formless geometric investigation. Although the show was favorably reviewed, Judd decided in 1957 to return to Columbia as a graduate student in art history, studying with the influential critic and art historian Meyer Schapiro. Judd himself began writing critical reviews in 1959 for Arts Magazine. He remained on its staff until 1965, also contributing essays to Art News and Art International, and he continued to write extensively throughout the next three decades. In 1964 Judd married the dancer Julie Margaret Hughan Finch; they had two children before divorcing in the 1980s.

In a series of bluntly intellectual reviews, Judd became an outspoken advocate for a new type of art. He severely questioned the European artistic tradition of composition based on the balance and harmony of the discrete parts of a painting or a sculpture. Reacting strongly against subjectivity and emotionalism, he was among those who declared painting “finished.” Judd came to believe in a non-metaphorical, autonomous, bare-bones type of art object—a pure object that could be appreciated solely for its essential formal properties of shape, color, surface, and volume. In 1964, in an important essay titled “Specific Objects” in Arts Yearbook 1965, Judd wrote: “The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.” In 1965 the critic Barbara Rose, writing in Art in America, used the word “minimum” when she referred to this new art. By the late 1960s the term “minimalism” was in common use, but for his part, Judd preferred to call his objects “specific” and referred to himself as an “empiricist.”

In the early 1960s, Judd abandoned painting and began making boxlike sculptures out of wood, metal, and Plexiglas. Inspired in part by the neutral, geometric forms he found in the paintings of Frank Stella, Judd utilized a clean, geometric language. Eventually he evolved a signature piece characterized by a five-sided box; groups of these were often arranged serially, either freestanding or mounted on the wall. Following a successful solo show at Manhattan’s Green Gallery (1963) in which he exhibited some plywood sculptures, Judd was able to have his work fabricated for him. Throughout the next two decades, he would send specific instructions to a manufacturing firm located in nearby Long Island City. These coolly elegant constructions, often made of copper and steel, would become synonymous with the minimalist movement.

In 1966 Judd joined the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan, and in the 1980s the Paula Cooper Gallery represented him. Judd exhibited his work widely, both nationally and internationally. Major retrospectives of his work occurred at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City in 1968 and in 1988 and 1989; at the Stedelijk Van Abbemmuseum, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 1970; and at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, in 1993 and 1994. In 1967 and 1976 he received National Endowment for the Arts grants and in 1968 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

In the early 1970s Judd purchased the 45,000-acre Ayala de Chinati Ranch overlooking the Rio Grande fifty miles south of Marfa, Texas. Over time Judd acquired seventeen buildings in and around Marfa, including the former 350-acre Fort D. A. Russell military post, which he renovated and converted into installation spaces for exhibiting his sculptures. The Marfa complex became Judd’s work in progress over the next thirteen years. Outside the confines of the gallery Judd was able to realize his works on a grand scale. Particularly impressive are the large Fort Russell artillery sheds, in which Judd placed 100 aluminum box sculptures.

The 1980s were a decade of withdrawal and controversy for Judd. By 1985 he had removed himself from the New York City art scene and set up permanent residence in Texas, where he devoted his energies to the Marfa project and to a newfound passion for furniture design. In the same year, Judd became involved in a legal dispute with the Dia Art Foundation over funding for the Marfa project. Eventually a suit was avoided, and Dia and Judd joined forces to create the Chinati Foundation for the purpose of maintaining the Fort Russell exhibition spaces. In the late 1980s Judd reproached the Guggenheim Museum for acquiring artworks from the collection of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Judd claimed that Panza had fabricated his works, part of the acquisition, without his permission.

In his last years Judd traveled extensively with his companion, Marianne Stockebrand. He died of lymphoma at the age of sixty-five and was buried at his beloved Chinati ranch.

For more than thirty years Judd was the principle figure of the minimalist movement. His focused critical writings and spare geometric constructions profoundly influenced a generation of important sculptors and painters, including Richard Serra and Carl Andre. The rigorous ideas of minimalism put forward by Judd also found expression in dance, music, and the International Style in architecture. Despite being often misunderstood by the general public, the vehemently antiexpressionistic, cool and precise artworks of Donald Judd profoundly informed general notions of what characterized “modern” in contemporary American art.

Donald Judd, Complete Writings: 1959–1975 (1975) and Complete Writings: 1975–1986 (1986) contain Judd’s critical writings and artist statements. Barbara Haskell, Donald Judd (1988) is an exhibition catalog for Judd’s 1988 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kenneth Baker, Minimalism (1988) is a primary source for information on the minimalist movement. The Tate Gallery Liverpool, Minimalism (1989), contains an anthology of quotations by critics and artists associated with the minimalist movement. An obituary is in the New York Times (13 Feb. 1994).

Peter Suchecki