Lot Essay
Donald Judd was one of the most important and influential artists of the latter half of the twentieth century. Both his writings and his art stressed logic and clarity to the exclusion of what he saw as the extraneous and unnecessary elements used by the Abstract Expressionist artists and championed by their critics in the 1950's. Judd "challenged the claim that the artist's personal gesture was essential to the creative process. He never ceased to impugn the mystique of personal gesture, as his later adoption of industrial fabrication attests..." (B. Haskell, Donald Judd, New York 1988, p. 30).
In his writings, Judd lauded the art that conformed to his ideas, and his own work was heavily influenced by other artists of his milieu who were exploring the most topical Modernist issues of the day. Artists such as Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland made work which was of particular interest to him.
Beginning around 1960, in the paintings which he made before moving to three-dimensional work, Judd emphasized a single, physical, non-expressionistic surface which strove to eliminate spatial illusion, like the work of Stella, Noland and Olitski. As he wrote of the new painting, "The image, all of the parts and the whole shape are co-extensive...Most of the new work has no structure in the usual sense, especially the work of Stella..." (D. DelBalso, B. Smith, R. Smith, Donald Judd, Ottawa 1975, p. 17). In Untitled, 1962, Judd used sand mixed with one color, cadmium red light, to emphasize the physical uniformity of the surface of the painting. Old-fashioned notions of composition were dismissed. The extra thickness of the piece--2¾ inches--emphasized its "object-nature", and was probably influenced by the 3-inch deep stretchers employed by Stella in his stripe paintings. The addition of a found object picked up on the street, the yellow Plexiglas oval placed in the center of the picture, reinforced Judd's concern for strictly factual as opposed to illusionary depth; unlike the kind of assemblage practiced by Rauschenberg and others at the time, Judd's use of the found object was strictly abstract and non-referential, and doesn't challenge the integrity of the picture plane like Rauschenberg's constructions. He "literally objectified his images. By incorporating real objects into his paintings, he avoided illusionism, since the shapes provided were actual rather than depicted" (B. Haskell, ibid, p. 27).
The paintings were an important phase of Judd's work. As Roberta Smith wrote:
These works are inert, coarse and carefully worked. An extraneous object is set into a densely colored, textured ground, contributing its own intrinsic color and surface. The surfaces are physical, but not mechanical or particularly tactile; their roughness is made especially visible by light cadmium red... Spatial illusion ceases to be a consideration; the only space is in the inserts and cuts Judd makes in the surface... [The paintings] finally seem inevitable, a quality which increases in Judd's work as it becomes more physical" (D. DelBalso, B. Smith, and R. Smith, op. cit., p. 19).
By late 1962, Judd had completed eleven of these painting constructions, and he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he had to move to three-dimensional work to achieve the concrete materiality he was seeking. The next body of works he completed were the cadmium red sculptures of 1963, shown at his first ground-breaking exhibition at The Green Gallery in New York late that year.
In his writings, Judd lauded the art that conformed to his ideas, and his own work was heavily influenced by other artists of his milieu who were exploring the most topical Modernist issues of the day. Artists such as Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland made work which was of particular interest to him.
Beginning around 1960, in the paintings which he made before moving to three-dimensional work, Judd emphasized a single, physical, non-expressionistic surface which strove to eliminate spatial illusion, like the work of Stella, Noland and Olitski. As he wrote of the new painting, "The image, all of the parts and the whole shape are co-extensive...Most of the new work has no structure in the usual sense, especially the work of Stella..." (D. DelBalso, B. Smith, R. Smith, Donald Judd, Ottawa 1975, p. 17). In Untitled, 1962, Judd used sand mixed with one color, cadmium red light, to emphasize the physical uniformity of the surface of the painting. Old-fashioned notions of composition were dismissed. The extra thickness of the piece--2¾ inches--emphasized its "object-nature", and was probably influenced by the 3-inch deep stretchers employed by Stella in his stripe paintings. The addition of a found object picked up on the street, the yellow Plexiglas oval placed in the center of the picture, reinforced Judd's concern for strictly factual as opposed to illusionary depth; unlike the kind of assemblage practiced by Rauschenberg and others at the time, Judd's use of the found object was strictly abstract and non-referential, and doesn't challenge the integrity of the picture plane like Rauschenberg's constructions. He "literally objectified his images. By incorporating real objects into his paintings, he avoided illusionism, since the shapes provided were actual rather than depicted" (B. Haskell, ibid, p. 27).
The paintings were an important phase of Judd's work. As Roberta Smith wrote:
These works are inert, coarse and carefully worked. An extraneous object is set into a densely colored, textured ground, contributing its own intrinsic color and surface. The surfaces are physical, but not mechanical or particularly tactile; their roughness is made especially visible by light cadmium red... Spatial illusion ceases to be a consideration; the only space is in the inserts and cuts Judd makes in the surface... [The paintings] finally seem inevitable, a quality which increases in Judd's work as it becomes more physical" (D. DelBalso, B. Smith, and R. Smith, op. cit., p. 19).
By late 1962, Judd had completed eleven of these painting constructions, and he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he had to move to three-dimensional work to achieve the concrete materiality he was seeking. The next body of works he completed were the cadmium red sculptures of 1963, shown at his first ground-breaking exhibition at The Green Gallery in New York late that year.