Donald Judd

Biography

In two former artillery sheds at Fort D. A. Russell near Marfa, Texas, stand a hundred untitled works in mill aluminium. Donald Judd made them between 1979 and 1986 and carefully rebuilt the sheds especially for them; outside, on the grounds of the fort, stand fifteen more of his works in concrete. Today this is part of the Chinati Foundation, opened in 1986 on the site of the abandoned fort.

He refused to call his pieces sculpture: they were not carved but assembled by small workshops using industrial processes.

Donald Clarence Judd was born on 3 June 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. In 1946–1947 he served in the Army as an engineer; in 1948 he enrolled at the College of William and Mary, then transferred to Columbia University, took a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and studied art history under Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Schapiro, while also attending the Art Students League. From the late 1940s he painted; his first solo exhibition, of expressionist paintings, was held in 1957 at the Panoras Gallery in New York. From 1959 to 1965 he wrote criticism for ARTnews, Arts Magazine and Art International, and discussed the work of more than five hundred artists showing in New York. At the same time he was cutting woodcuts, moving from figurative to increasingly abstract motifs; the woodcut remained his main printmaking technique.

His next solo exhibition, at the Green Gallery in 1963, was already a show of objects. By then he had settled on a vocabulary of forms that he would use for another thirty years: stacks, boxes, progressions. In 1964 came the first floor box, in 1965 the first box with Plexiglas and the first stack, a column of identical iron units running from floor to ceiling. At first he made the pieces himself, together with his father, Roy Judd, and from 1964 he began to commission them from his drawings from professional craftsmen and manufacturers. In the essay “Specific Objects” (published in 1965) he wrote that the new American art was giving up inherited European values, illusion and represented space, in favour of real space. In 1966, at the exhibition “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in New York, he argued with Mark di Suvero, who maintained that a real artist makes his own work; Judd replied that the method does not matter as long as the result is art. He did not regard Minimalism as a movement: the common features, he wrote, were too few, and the differences outweighed the similarities.

In 1968 the Whitney Museum staged a retrospective of his work that included not a single early painting, and the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. That year too he bought a five-storey cast-iron building of 1870 at 101 Spring Street in New York, and over the next twenty-five years rebuilt it floor by floor, placing in it his own works and pieces by other artists. From this grew his central idea: works should be installed permanently, in places designed for them. Temporary exhibitions, he believed, are made by curators for the public, and the art recedes into the background.

In the early 1970s he began going every year to the desert of Baja California, and in 1971 he rented a house in Marfa. Later he bought numerous buildings there and more than 32,000 acres of ranch land. His works grew in size; he began making room-sized installations, in the early 1970s switched to unpainted plywood, in the 1980s took up Cor-ten steel, and from 1984 commissioned works in enamelled aluminium from the Swiss firm Lehni, in which for the first time he combined more than two colours in a single piece. He began making furniture in 1970, with a bed and a sink for the Spring Street building, and in Marfa chairs, tables and shelves followed. Yet he kept furniture strictly apart from art: a chair, he wrote in 1993, exists as a chair. For about ten years the architect Lauretta Vinciarelli worked with him, and her influence can be seen in his architecture and furniture. In 1979, with the support of the Dia Art Foundation, he acquired 340 acres of land with the buildings of Fort Russell. To my mind, Chinati is his principal work: art, architecture and land brought together into one whole.

He taught at the Brooklyn Museum, Dartmouth College, Yale and Oberlin, collected his writings in two volumes (1975 and 1987), took part in the Venice Biennale for the first time in 1980 and in Documenta in 1982, and in 1988 the Whitney Museum showed a second retrospective. In 1990 he opened a studio in Cologne, in a former liquor factory of the 1920s.

Donald Judd died in Manhattan on 12 February 1994. A series of fountains for Winterthur in Switzerland and a glass facade for the railway station in Basel were left unfinished. The Judd Foundation, which he had conceived as early as 1977, was established in 1996 and looks after his building on Spring Street and his buildings in Marfa.