Donald judd death

American artist (–)

Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, &#;&#; February 12, ) was an American artist associated with minimalism.^[1][2] In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy.

He is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism", and its most important theoretician through such writings as "Specific Objects" ().^[3] Judd voiced his unorthodox perception of minimalism in Arts Yearbook 8, where he says, "The new three dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school, or style.

The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities."^[4]

Early life and education

Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.^[2] From to , he served in the Army as an engineer, and in , he enrolled in the College of William and Mary.

Later, he transferred to Columbia University School of General Studies where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and where he worked towards a master's in art history under Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Schapiro while attending classes at the Art Students League of New York. From to , he wrote art criticism for major American art magazines.

Robert morris artist Movements Timeline. In the early s, Judd began to work on increasingly large and complex pieces, such as large, hollow boxes made of steel or copper, often colored with an enameled surface on the inside, which were placed directly on to the floor. He spent much of his early childhood on his grandparents' farm and continued to live in the Midwest with his parents until they finally settled in New Jersey. Judd studied philosophy, art, and art history at the Art Students League and at Columbia University, and his earliest works, including paintings and woodcuts such as Untitled S.

In , he bought a five-story cast-iron building at Spring Street for less than $70,^[5] Judd used the building (designed by Nicholas Whyte and built in ) as his New York residence and studio, and during the next 25 years, renovated it floor by floor, occasionally installing works he purchased or commissioned from other artists.^[6]

Work

Early work

In the late s, Donald Judd began to practice as a painter.

His first solo exhibition, of expressionist paintings, at the Panoras Gallery in New York, opened in ^[7] From the mids to , as he started to explore the medium of the woodcut, Judd progressively moved from figurative to increasingly abstract imagery, first carving organic rounded shapes, then moving on to the painstaking craftsmanship of straight lines and angles.^[8] His artistic style soon moved away from illusory media and embraced constructions in which materiality was central to the work.

He would not have another one person show until the Green Gallery in , an exhibition of works that he finally thought worthy of showing.

By Judd had established an essential vocabulary of forms — 'stacks', 'boxes' and 'progressions' — which preoccupied him for the next thirty years.^[9] Most of his output was in freestanding "specific objects" (the name of his seminal essay of published in Arts Yearbook 8, ), that used simple, often repeated forms to explore space and the use of space.

Humble materials such as metals, industrial plywood, concrete and color-impregnated Plexiglas became staples of his career. Judd's first floor box structure was made in , and his first floor box using Plexiglas followed one year later. Also by , he began work on wall-mounted sculptures, and first developed the curved progression format of these works in as a development from his work on an untitled floor piece that set a hollow pipe into a solid wooden block.^[10] While Judd executed early works himself (in collaboration with his father, Roy Judd), in he began delegating fabrication to professional artisans and manufacturers (such as the industrial manufacturers Bernstein Brothers)^[10] based on his drawings.^[11] In , Judd created his first stack, an arrangement of identical iron units stretching from floor to ceiling.^[12]

As he abandoned painting for sculpture in the early s, he wrote the essay "Specific Objects" in ^[13] In his essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values, these values being illusion and represented space, as opposed to real space.

He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including H.C. Westermann, Lucas Samaras, John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin, George Earl Ortman and Lee Bontecou. The works that Judd had fabricated inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture and in fact he refused to call them sculpture, pointing out that they were not sculpted but made by small fabricators using industrial processes.

That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd. He displayed two pieces in the seminal exhibit, "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum in New York where, during a panel discussion of the work, he challenged Mark di Suvero's assertion that real artists make their own art.

He replied that methods should not matter as long as the results create art; a groundbreaking concept in the accepted creation process. In , the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a retrospective of his work which included none of his early paintings.^[14] That same year, Judd received a Guggenheim Fellowship^[15] for Fine Arts.

In , Judd bought a five-story building in New York that allowed him to start placing his work in a more permanent manner than was possible in gallery or museum shows. This would later lead him to push for permanent installations for his work and that of others, as he believed that temporary exhibitions, being designed by curators for the public, placed the art itself in the background, ultimately degrading it due to incompetency or incomprehension.

This would become a major preoccupation as the idea of permanent installation grew in importance and his distaste for the art world grew in equal proportion.

Mature work

In the early seventies Judd started making annual trips to Baja California with his family. He was affected by the clean, empty desert and this strong attachment to the land would remain with him for the rest of his life.

In he rented a house in Marfa, Texas, where he would later buy numerous buildings and acquired over 32, acres (&#;km²) of ranch land, collectively known as Ayala de Chinati.^[16] During this decade, Judd's art increased in scale and complexity.^[17] He started making room sized installations that made the spaces themselves his playground and the viewing of his art a visceral, physical experience.

Throughout the s and s he produced radical work that eschewed the classical European ideals of representational sculpture. Judd believed that art should not represent anything, that it should unequivocally stand on its own and simply exist. His aesthetic followed his own strict rules against illusion and falsity, producing work that was clear, strong and definite.

Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Northern Kentucky University commissioned a 9 feet (&#;m) aluminum sculpture from Judd that was unveiled in the middle of the school's campus in ^[18] Another commission, Untitled (), a three-part sculpture out of concrete with steel reinforcements, was installed at Laumeier Sculpture Park.^[19]

Judd started using unpainted plywood in the early s,^[20] a material the artist embraced for its durable structural qualities, which enabled him to expand the size of his works while avoiding the problem of bending or buckling.

Plywood had been the staple of his art earlier, but never unpainted.^[21] In ^[22] Judd appointed Peter Ballantine, a former Whitney Independent Study Program student, as the primary fabricator of his plywood works.^[23] He later began using Cor-ten steel in the s for a small number of large-scale outdoor pieces, and by would create single and multi-part works with the material.

The Cor-ten works are unique in that they are the only works the artist himself fabricated in Marfa, Texas.

The artist began working with enamel on aluminum in , when he commissioned Lehni AG in Switzerland to construct works by bending and riveting thin sheets of the material, a process Judd previously used to create furniture.

These pieces were initially created for a temporary outdoor exhibition in Merian Park outside Basel.^{[citation needed]} Judd would continue to produce pieces using these techniques through the early s. Judd's work with enamel on aluminum greatly expanded his palette of colors, which had previously been restricted to the colors of anodized metal and Plexiglas, and led to the use of more than two colors in an individual artwork.

Donald judd artist statement But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvas, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment. Contemporary Art. Donald Clarence Judd June 3, — February 12, was an American artist associated with minimalism. Untitled

Combining a wide range of colors, he used the material to create five large-scale floor pieces and many horizontal wall works in unique variations of color and size.^[24][25] Judd's only known work in granite, an untitled Sierra White granite floor piece from , measures 72 x x 12". The structure is composed of two vertical slabs that rest on the floor, to which the bottom component is conjoined, and the ceiling of the structure extends to the outer edges of the vertical walls.^[26]

In , Judd opened an atelier in an old liquor factory from at Mülheimer Hafen in Cologne, Germany.^[27]

Works in edition

Over the course of four decades, Donald Judd created hundreds of prints using aquatint, etching, and screen print techniques though woodcut was his primary print medium.

Judd began to make figurative prints in while at the Art Students League, transitioning to abstract images by the mids.^[28] Working first with lithographs, Judd shifted his attention to woodcuts, which became his dominant print medium as early as As a printmaker, Judd investigated many of the same issues of form and color that are found in his paintings and three-dimensional works.^[29]

In Judd conceived and designed a parallelogram woodcut series.

This is based on thirteen different patterns of twelve parallel lines, and their mirror images, thus there are 26 prints in total. Within the parallelogram woodcut series there exists one exceptional, experimental impression of Untitled (6-L) (), now in the Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania.

Rejecting the more traditional rectangular paper shape, this impression of Untitled (6-L) is cut into the shape of a parallelogram.^[30]

Between the years and , Judd made eight different sets of works in editions ranging from three to two hundred in a range of materials: stainless steel, galvanized iron, cold-rolled steel, anodized aluminum, acrylic sheet, and wood.^[31]

Furniture design and architecture

Judd also worked with furniture, design, and architecture.

He was careful to distinguish his design practice from his artwork, writing in

The configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. The intent of art is different from that of the latter, which must be functional. If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous.

The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair&#; A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself.^[32]

The first furniture, a bed and a sink, Judd designed in for Spring Street.^[33] After he moved from New York to Marfa his designs started to include chairs, beds, shelves, desks and tables.

Judd was initially prompted to design furniture by his own dissatisfaction with what was commercially available in Marfa. Early furniture was made by Judd of rough, lumberyard-cut pine but he continually refined the construction of the wooden pieces, employing craftspeople using a variety of techniques and materials around the world.^[32]

Judd's activity in architecture and furniture design increased beginning around , at which time he was involved professionally and romantically with Lauretta Vinciarelli, an Italian-born architect and artist.^[34] Vinciarelli lived and worked with Judd in Marfa and New York for roughly a decade and collaborated with him on projects for Providence and Cleveland, and her influence can be seen on his architecture and furniture design.^[35] In fact, in a article published in Architectural Digest, William C.

Agee stated that Judd and Vinciarelli were "starting a firm".^[36]

At the time of his death, he was working on a series of fountains commissioned by the city of Winterthur in , Switzerland, and a new glass facade for a railroad station in Basel, Switzerland.^[37]

In , Judd commissioned Lehni AG, the fabricator of his multi-colored works in Dübendorf, Switzerland to produce his furniture designs in sheet metal, in finishes of monochrome colored powdercoat based on the RAL colour standard, clear anodized aluminium, or solid copper.

Today, Lehni AG still fabricates Judd metal furniture in 21 colors, which are sold through the Judd Foundation alongside his furniture in wood and plywood.^[38][39]

Chinati Foundation

Main article: Chinati Foundation

In , with help from the Dia Art Foundation, Judd purchased a acres (&#;km²) tract of desert land near Marfa,^[13] which included the abandoned buildings of the former U.S.

Army Fort D. A. Russell. The Chinati Foundation opened on the site in as a non-profit art foundation, dedicated to Judd and his contemporaries. The permanent collection consists of large-scale works by Judd, sculptor John Chamberlain, light-artist Dan Flavin and select others, including Ingólfor Arnarsson, David Rabinowitch, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, as well as Robert Irwin.

Judd's work at Chinati includes 15 outdoor works in concrete and aluminum pieces housed in two former artillery sheds that he adapted in great detail specifically for the installation of the work.

Academic work

Judd taught at several academic institutions in the United States: The Allen-Stevenson School (s), Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (–64); Dartmouth College, Hanover (); and Yale University, New Haven ().

In he served as Baldwin Professor at Oberlin College in Ohio. Beginning in , he lectured at universities across the United States, Europe and Asia on both art and its relationship to architecture. During his lifetime, Judd published a large body of theoretical writings, in which he rigorously promoted the cause of Minimalist Art; these essays were consolidated into two volumes, published in and ^[40]

Writings

In his reviews as a critic, Judd discussed in detail the work of more than artists showing in New York in the early and mids for publications including ARTnews,Arts Magazine, and Art International.

He provided a critical account of this significant era of art in America while addressing the social and political ramifications of art production. His essay "Specific Objects", first published in , remains central to the analysis of the new art development in the early s.^[41]

Four major collections of his writings were published during his lifetime.

Donald Judd: Complete Writings (Halifax, Nova Scotia/New York: Press of the College of Art and Design/New York University Press, ); Donald Judd: Complete Writings: (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, ); Donald Judd: Architektur (Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, ); Donald Judd: Écrits (Paris: Daniel Lelong, ).^{[42][43][44][45]}

Exhibitions

The artist's work has been included in over solo museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide,^[46] excluding site-specific works.

The Panoras Gallery organized Judd's first solo exhibition in ^[47] In , the Green Gallery mounted his first solo exhibition of three-dimensional work. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized the first retrospective of his work in ^[3]

The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, presented Don Judd in , which also traveled to the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, the Kunstverein Hannover, Germany, as well as Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, UK.^[48] In , the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, organized a large exhibition in and published a catalogue raisonné of Judd's work.^[49]

Judd participated in his first Venice Biennale in , and in Documenta, Kassel, in ^[40] In , another large Judd-exhibition was presented at the Van Abbemuseum; this show also traveled to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain, and Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy.^[50]

The Whitney Museum organized a second, traveling retrospective of his work in , and another major European survey, Donald Judd, was mounted at Tate Modern,^[51] London, in , which traveled to major museums in Düsseldorf and Basel through

Other important exhibitions include Donald Judd: Prints –, Retrospektive der Druckgraphik, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, –;^[46]Donald Judd.

Early Work – at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, ;^[46]Donald Judd Colorist, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany, ^[46]Judd, a large retrospective of Judd's work opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in March ^[52]

Awards

• Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, ^[53]
• Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture from the , Maine, ^[53]
• Brandeis University Medal for Sculpture from Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, ^[54]
• Award,
• Elected Foreign Member, Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts,
• Elected Member of the Littlefield Society, University of Texas, Austin,
• Sikkens Award from Sikkens Foundation, Sassenheim, Netherlands, ^[55]
• Stankowski Prize from Stankowski Foundation, Stuttgart, Germany, ^[56]

Museum collections

• Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York^[57]
• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia^[58]
• Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia^[59]
• Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois^[60]
• The Broad, Los Angeles^[61]
• Centre national des arts plastiques, Avignon, France^[62]
• Centre Pompidou, Paris^[63]
• The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas^[64]
• Cleveland Museum of Arts, Cleveland, Ohio^[65]
• Colección De Arte Contemporaneo Fundacion La Caixa, Barcelona, Spain^[66]
• Cranbrook Art Museum^[67]
• Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas^[68]
• Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas^[69]
• Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado^[70]
• Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa^[71]
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan^{[citation needed]}
• Dia:Beacon, New York^[72]
• Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Spain^[73]
• Governor Nelson A.

  Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, NY;^[74]

• Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich^[75]
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago^[76]
• Hallen für Neue Kunst Schaffhausen, Switzerland
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington.^[77]
• Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington
• Israel Museum, Jerusalem
• Judd Foundation, New York/Texas^[78]
• Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland^[79]
• Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland
• Kunstmuseum St.

  Gallen, Switzerland

• Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea^[80]
• Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria^[81]
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art^[82]
• Menil Collection, Houston, Texas^[83]
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York^[84]
• Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin^[85]
• Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
• Mumok, Vienna, Austria^[86]
• Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, St.

  Etienne^[87]

• Musée de Grenoble, France
• Musée départemental d'Art ancien et contemporain, Epinal, France
• Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, Spain^[88]
• Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain^[89]
• Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Netherlands^[90]
• Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna^[91]
• Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany^[92]
• Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany^[93]
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois^[94]
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
• Museum of Modern Art, New York^[95]
• Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, Japan^[96]
• Museum Wiesbaden, Germany
• National Gallery of Art, Washington^[97]
• National Gallery of Australia^[98]
• National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
• Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany
• Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy
• Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels^[99]
• Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington^[]
• Sammlung FER Collection, Ulm, Germany^[]
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art^[]
• Skulptur Projekte Münster, Germany^[]
• Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany
• Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York
• Solomon R.

  Guggenheim Museum, New York^[]

• Smithsonian American Art Museum^[]
• Tate Modern and the Tate Britain, London^[]
• Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran
• Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands^[]
• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia^[]
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis^[]
• Western Washington University Public Sculpture Collection
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York^[]

Judd Foundation

Originally conceived by Judd in , and created in , the Judd Foundation was formed in order to preserve the work and installations of Judd in Marfa, Texas and at Spring Street in New York.^[] Judd Foundation maintains and preserves his permanently installed living and working spaces, libraries, and archives across 22 buildings that comprise more than , square feet (approx.

m²) and are considered fundamental components to the understanding of Judd's work as they remain the standard for his concept of permanent installation. The Foundation promotes a wider understanding of Judd's artistic legacy by providing access to these spaces and resources and by developing scholarly and educational programs.

Judd Foundation is a tax-exempt (c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

In , Judd Foundation established an endowment to support its operations through the sale of 36 works at auction. The foundation board requested one of its members, publisher Richard Schlagman, to get Christie's and Sotheby's to submit proposals for the sale of a group of works.^[] Christie's offered a reported $21 million guarantee and agreed to display the consigned work for five weeks in New York on the 20th floor of the Simon & Schuster building.

Concerns that the sale would have an adverse effect on the market proved unfounded and the exhibition itself won an AICA award for "Best Installation in an Alternative Space" for The $20 million in proceeds from the sale went into an endowment to enable the Foundation to fulfill its mission, by supporting the permanent installations that are located at Spring Street in New York City and Marfa, Texas.

Marianne Stockebrand, the director of the Chinati Foundation at the time, resigned from her post on the Judd Foundation's board partly in protest of the auction.^[]

In , the Judd Foundation — led by the artist's children — completed a $23 million renovation of Spring Street, opening the building to the public for the first time.^[] In , Judd Foundation began a long-term restoration plan for its buildings in Marfa.^[] In , eight of the buildings stewarded by Judd Foundation in Marfa were added to the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Central Marfa Historic District.

The listing is the first time that Judd's approach to architecture and preservation has been recognized as historically significant at the federal level.^[]

The publication program of Judd Foundation intends to develop texts for scholars, students, and those interested in the life and work of Judd.

Judd Foundation published a reprint edition of Donald Judd: Complete Writings (); and co-published Donald Judd Writings (), a new collection of Judd's writings and notes; Donald Judd Interviews (); and Donald Judd Spaces ().

A comprehensive catalogue raisonné of paintings, objects, and wood-blocks is currently in the research phase by Judd Foundation.^[][][]

Art market

The Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, represented the artist from to Judd then worked with Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, where he had a number of solo shows, and PaceWildenstein, which represented him through the end of his life.

Judd's work has been represented – through the Judd Foundation – by Gagosian Gallery since September and Thaddaeus Ropac since ^[][][]

Prices for Judd's works first peaked in , when a group of six Plexiglas boxes sold for $ million.^[] One of Judd's large stacks, comprising 10 galvanised iron elements with nine-inch (&#;mm) intervals, untitled () fetched $ million at Christie's in ^[] Judd's ten-unit untitled () made of stainless steel and amber Plexiglas was sold for $ million^[] at Christie's New York in As of , the artist's auction record is held by untitled () a large-scale sculpture executed in galvanized iron, aluminum and wood, which sold for $14,, at Christie's New York in ^[]

Personal life

Judd married dancer Julie Finch in and together they had two children, son Flavin Starbuck Judd (born ) and daughter Rainer Yingling Judd (born ).

The couple divorced in From the late s to the mids Judd was partners with artist, architect, and educator Lauretta Vinciarelli.^[] In , he met curator and museum director Marianne Stockebrand, who became the director and later, director emerita of Chinati Foundation.^[]

Judd had homes in Manhattan, Marfa, Texas, and Kussnacht am Rigi, Switzerland.^[37] He died in Manhattan of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on February 12, , aged ^[]

References