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拍品專文
An early, important example of Donald Judd’s wall structures from 1964, untitled consists of a brass horizontal element supporting five galvanized iron verticals, informally known as ‘Dayton Legs.’ One of the first works to demonstrate Judd’s turn away from painting, this exceptionally rare work defined his practice to come, achieving a poised elegance that “doesn’t look like either order or disorder,” according to the artist (quoted in B. Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd, Interview by Bruce Glaser, in G. Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Los Angeles, 1995, p. 156).
In the present work, Judd first achieved his stated desire to produce art without any illusionary properties, a conceit he would continue to explore the remainder of his career. The present example, in brass, was Judd’s favorite realization from the series, as he described in an interview from 1966: “To me the piece with the brass and the five verticals is above all that shape… The verticals below the brass both support the brass and pend from it, and the length is just enough so that it seems that they hang, as well as support it, so they’re caught there” (quoted in ibid., pp. 155-56). The horizontal expanse of the brass element opens an elongated space upon which the five blue vertical elements are suspended. With this wall piece, Judd explores the complex interplay between color and surface by juxtaposing his blue forms against the brass, contrasting the deep matte blue of the galvanized iron with the shimmering metallic surface. Here, Judd describes through his materials his chromatic conceit that “color is like material. It is one way or another, but it obdurately exists” (D. Judd, Some aspects of color in general and red and black in particular, Sassenheim, 1993, n.p.).
In the 1960s, Donald Judd gradually developed an aesthetic skepticism towards the art of his time, identifying a certain illusionary quality to both painting and sculpture which he sought to remove from his work. Fundamental to him was art’s autonomous and non-referential quality, and he sought to encourage a progressive continuity toward the elimination of spatial illusionism in art: “The image within the rectangle… has to go entirely” (quoted in B. Haskell, “Donald Judd: Beyond Formalism,” in B. Haskell, Donald Judd, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1988, p. 81). As the curator and art historian Barbara Haskell writes, “from the beginning of his career, Judd’s aesthetic mandate had been the elimination of deceit and falsehood,” as elucidated in untitled (ibid., p. 27). The present work represents one of the artist’s first forays into the third dimension, having given up his early painting practice after realizing that painting could never escape a sense of illusionism. In his new three-dimensional works, “structure and image were coextensive” and Judd restricted himself to the objective facts of his works’ color, form, surface, and texture (ibid., p. 30). As Judd proclaimed: “There is a breakdown in universal and general values. Grand philosophical systems… are not credible anymore” (quoted in ibid., p. 42).
As the scholar Dietmar Elger writes, “For many younger artists, Donald Judd became a guiding light and a role model, in that he not only provided them with a vocabulary of forms that they could appropriate—citing or reworking what they found—but he also demonstrated through the consistency and confidence” (Donald Judd: Colorist, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2000, p. 7). untitled represents one of the first mature works expressing the revelatory artistic conceits that have profoundly affected contemporary art to the present day. Donald Judd is now regarded as the outstanding exponent of Minimalist art, and his centrality to the movement and to succeeding generations is self-evident. Alongside various individual cube or rectangular works,” the art historian Martin Enger elucidates, “we encounter, above all, horizontal or vertical progressions: his stacks and rows of square and cubes… become the basic vocabulary of his works” (M. Enger, “Specific Objects—The Illusion of Factuality,” in Dietmar Elger, op. cit., p. 55). As an exceptional early example of Donald Judd’s mature aesthetic, untitled is one of the first works to reveal the vocabulary that the artist would continue to develop for the remainder of his career.
In the present work, Judd first achieved his stated desire to produce art without any illusionary properties, a conceit he would continue to explore the remainder of his career. The present example, in brass, was Judd’s favorite realization from the series, as he described in an interview from 1966: “To me the piece with the brass and the five verticals is above all that shape… The verticals below the brass both support the brass and pend from it, and the length is just enough so that it seems that they hang, as well as support it, so they’re caught there” (quoted in ibid., pp. 155-56). The horizontal expanse of the brass element opens an elongated space upon which the five blue vertical elements are suspended. With this wall piece, Judd explores the complex interplay between color and surface by juxtaposing his blue forms against the brass, contrasting the deep matte blue of the galvanized iron with the shimmering metallic surface. Here, Judd describes through his materials his chromatic conceit that “color is like material. It is one way or another, but it obdurately exists” (D. Judd, Some aspects of color in general and red and black in particular, Sassenheim, 1993, n.p.).
In the 1960s, Donald Judd gradually developed an aesthetic skepticism towards the art of his time, identifying a certain illusionary quality to both painting and sculpture which he sought to remove from his work. Fundamental to him was art’s autonomous and non-referential quality, and he sought to encourage a progressive continuity toward the elimination of spatial illusionism in art: “The image within the rectangle… has to go entirely” (quoted in B. Haskell, “Donald Judd: Beyond Formalism,” in B. Haskell, Donald Judd, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1988, p. 81). As the curator and art historian Barbara Haskell writes, “from the beginning of his career, Judd’s aesthetic mandate had been the elimination of deceit and falsehood,” as elucidated in untitled (ibid., p. 27). The present work represents one of the artist’s first forays into the third dimension, having given up his early painting practice after realizing that painting could never escape a sense of illusionism. In his new three-dimensional works, “structure and image were coextensive” and Judd restricted himself to the objective facts of his works’ color, form, surface, and texture (ibid., p. 30). As Judd proclaimed: “There is a breakdown in universal and general values. Grand philosophical systems… are not credible anymore” (quoted in ibid., p. 42).
As the scholar Dietmar Elger writes, “For many younger artists, Donald Judd became a guiding light and a role model, in that he not only provided them with a vocabulary of forms that they could appropriate—citing or reworking what they found—but he also demonstrated through the consistency and confidence” (Donald Judd: Colorist, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2000, p. 7). untitled represents one of the first mature works expressing the revelatory artistic conceits that have profoundly affected contemporary art to the present day. Donald Judd is now regarded as the outstanding exponent of Minimalist art, and his centrality to the movement and to succeeding generations is self-evident. Alongside various individual cube or rectangular works,” the art historian Martin Enger elucidates, “we encounter, above all, horizontal or vertical progressions: his stacks and rows of square and cubes… become the basic vocabulary of his works” (M. Enger, “Specific Objects—The Illusion of Factuality,” in Dietmar Elger, op. cit., p. 55). As an exceptional early example of Donald Judd’s mature aesthetic, untitled is one of the first works to reveal the vocabulary that the artist would continue to develop for the remainder of his career.