Donald Judd

This catalog follows the first solo exhibition of Donald Judd’s work in South Korea for nearly 10 years. Judd (1928–94) had a personal connection to Korea, having been stationed in Seoul in 1947. The Korean concept of pungsu, similar to the Chinese Feng shui, was instrumental to his visualization of space. Curated by Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of the Judd Foundation, the exhibition presented more than three decades of the artist’s work, and features his experiments in Minimalism across multiple mediums. These works are documented in this publication, which has been conceived in close collaboration with Flavin Judd. The design is a reflection of Donald Judd’s aesthetic values. Its unique binding and layout, which investigate the relationship between presence and emptiness, speak to the rigorous attention to simplicity of form that characterizes the artist’s work.

Published to accompany the first US retrospective exhibition of Donald Judd’s sculpture in more than 30 years, Judd explores the work of a landmark artist who, over the course of his career, developed a material and formal vocabulary that transformed the field of modern sculpture.

Donald Judd was among a generation of artists in the 1960s who sought to entirely do away with illusion, narrative and metaphorical content. He turned to three dimensions as well as industrial working methods and materials in order to investigate “real space,” by his definition. Judd surveys the evolution of the artist’s work, beginning with his paintings, reliefs and handmade objects from the early 1960s; through the years in which he built an iconic vocabulary of works in three dimensions, including hollow boxes, stacks and progressions made with metals and plastics by commercial fabricators; and continuing through his extensive engagement with color during the last decade of his life.

This richly illustrated catalog takes a close look at Judd’s achievements, and, using newly available archival materials at the Judd Foundation and elsewhere, expands scholarly perspectives on his work. The essays address subjects such as his early beginnings in painting, the fabrication of his sculptures, his site-specific pieces and his work in design and architecture.

Donald Judd (1928–94) began his professional career working as a painter while studying art history and writing art criticism. One of the foremost sculptors of our time, Judd refused this designation and other attempts to label his art: his revolutionary approach to form, materials, working methods and display went beyond the set of existing terms in midcentury New York. His work, in turn, changed the language of modern sculpture.

This publication presents key works by Donald Judd (1928–94), presented in a seminal exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris. Specially made in collaboration with the exhibition curator Flavin Judd, this catalog brings form and content together in an innovative design, and includes full-spread installation views, archival material and photographs, a foreword by Flavin Judd and the exclusive translation of “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” an expansive essay by the artist originally published at the zenith of his career, in 1993.

The essay by renowned art historian Catherine Millet is as incisive as it is personal (Millet interviewed Judd when his work was first exhibited in France).

This important new publication collects more than 20 years of sustained thinking about Donald Judd from one of today’s most respected art historians and theorists. In Sensuous Thoughts, Richard Shiff draws on Judd’s own writing, on the work of the pragmatist philosophers Charles Sander Pierce and William James, and on interviews with many of Judd's contemporaries and close relations, to dramatically enhance the act of looking at Judd’s work.

Across nearly 300 pages, Shiff closely explicates such topics as Judd's dialogues with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Bontecou and Claes Oldenburg, among others; while other essays examine the impact that Judd's writings, such as "Specific Objects," had on his own work.

Sensuous Thoughts also includes 140 color images as both reference throughout and in a dedicated plate section in the back of the book.

Richard Shiff (born 1943) is the author of Doubt: Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism and Writing after Art: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Artists, and is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Donald Judd (1928–94) was closely connected to Switzerland. From the early 1970s until his death, the American artist produced significant exhibitions there; more importantly, though his residences in Marfa and New York are legendary, less well-known is the hotel at Eichholteren which Judd transformed into an extraordinary residence on the banks of Lake Lucerne that tests the tensions and affinities between Swiss architecture and Judd’s doctrines.

Judd also collaborated with Swiss industrial firms to produce numerous artworks and design pieces, notably the Menziken Pieces. This new volume sheds light on the artist’s collaborations with Swiss manufacturing firm Alu Menziken AG, and other Swiss companies. Donald Judd & Switzerland also examines the artist’s continuing influence in Swiss art and design. In addition, Judd’s contemporaries in Switzerland offer an expanded picture of Judd’s Swiss years.

Complete Writings 1959–1975 was first published in 1975 by The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and since then it has been the primary source for Donald Judd’s early writing. Working as an art critic for the magazines Arts, Arts Magazine and, later, Art International, Judd regularly contributed reviews of contemporary art exhibitions between 1959 and 1965, but continued to write throughout his life on a broad range of subjects. In his reviews and essays, Judd discussed in detail the work of more than 500 artists showing in New York in the early and mid-1960s, and provided a critical account of this significant era of art in America. While addressing the social and political ramifications of art production, the writings frequently addressed the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Kenneth Noland and Claes Oldenburg. Judd’s essay "Specific Objects," first published in 1965, remains central to the analysis of the new art developed in the early 1960s. Other essays included in this publication are "Complaints I" (1969), "Complaints II" (1973) and his previously unpublished essay "Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism" (1975), all of which establish the polemical importance of Judd’s writing.