One recent afternoon in Donald Judd’s old house in downtown Manhattan, the late artist’s children—Flavin and Rainer—were discussing their father’s career. Flavin has a boyish, unlined face framed by reddish-blond hair. Rainer inherited her slender build from their mother, dancer Julie Finch. Flavin, standing in the kitchen, froze abruptly, his pale eyebrows furrowing. “The meat thing is in the wrong place,” he said.
“No!” his younger sister said, stricken. Absorbing this sacrilege from a balcony, she reconsidered. “Which meat thing? Oh! That meat thing. I actually moved it.”
The meat thing was a morsa, a hefty, surgical-looking clamp designed to slice prosciutto. Flavin regarded the displaced device with consternation. “It’s not supposed to be here,” he said.
“You can move it back,” said Rainer. Dust motes, let alone morsas, don’t usually move in 101 Spring Street, the five-story cadet-blue cast-iron building in SoHo at the corner of Mercer, where Rainer and Flavin spent their early childhood. The building is now the headquarters of the Judd Foundation, established in 1996 to protect and preserve the artist’s work. In the basement are the foundation’s offices; on every other floor is an astonishing feat of conservation.
The top floor glows violet in the aura of a fluorescent sculpture by Dan Flavin, Judd’s friend and his firstborn’s namesake (Rainer is named for Yvonne Rainer, the dancer). Judd’s wool jackets and work shirts hang in small closets. Near the low walnut platform bed, a Judd design, is an example of his early work: a dense assemblage of steel and cadmium red–painted wood that he made by hand in 1961, before he famously began outsourcing fabrication to industrial factories. Down on the second floor, the kitchen and dining area are flooded with the same scorching sunlight causing clothes to stick to tourists on the street below, but with none of the heat, honks, or grime of the outside world. The silent rooms remain almost exactly as Judd left them when he died in 1994. Nothing is arbitrary or accidental. Gingerly exploring the home-studio engenders an acute awareness of oneself as an interloper, a messy unplanned element in this hyper-considered realm, like a germ infiltrating an operating theater. Unlike when Judd lived there without air conditioning, the space is now cool, its temperature perfectly calibrated to keep Judd’s residence, and legacy, on ice.
Born two years apart, in 1968 and 1970, Flavin and Rainer present a tightly unified front. Earlier that June morning, they sat barricaded behind an enormous mahogany table. It is a formidable piece of Judd’s own design: clean, deliberate and utterly uncompromising, rather like the artist himself and the foundation that bears his name, of which his children are co-presidents. The siblings talked about making their father’s prodigious output accessible. “The Judd Foundation is one big tool box,” said Rainer, evoking the archive of Judd’s writings, his carefully installed properties in New York and Marfa, Texas, his 13,000-volume library, and his artwork and furniture. “I mean, hell if we don’t need a tool box right now,” she added.
In November, David Zwirner Books, the publishing imprint of the gallery that represents the Judd Foundation, will release, in collaboration with the foundation, "Donald Judd Writings," a tome containing the artist’s obscurely or never-before published essays, personal letters, and notes. These are woven in amongst the texts collected during his lifetime which were published as "Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975." Better known as the Yellow Book, it was reissued by the foundation this past March. "Donald Judd Writings" augments the known essays on art and architecture—clear, direct and tersely unequivocal—with welcome shades of nuance. In ruminative asides, we witness Judd working through his ideas.
The new book is a prelude to a larger moment for the artist. By now, Judd’s influence is so widespread, so casually ingrained in contemporary art and design, it’s easy to forget it’s there. That will change over the next year. Since 2009, the foundation has been updating Judd’s catalogue raisonné—a previous, necessarily incomplete one was published during his lifetime—and put out a call for works this past May. Next fall will bring a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York curated by Ann Temkin. The long-awaited survey will be Judd’s first in the United States since 1988, when 30 works went on view at the Whitney Museum, and will provide a fresh opportunity to consider his incisive originality and lingering impact.
Meanwhile, Rainer and Flavin preside over a sprawling kingdom. They became executors of their father’s estate when they were 23 and 25, along with Marianne Stockebrand, the German curator who was Judd’s companion for the last four years of his life. (The estate’s assets—including artworks, 101 Spring Street and numerous live/work spaces in Marfa—were ultimately transferred to the foundation.)
The children each inherited $300,000, millions in debt, and a request that would determine the rest of their adult lives: Judd wanted his properties in New York and Marfa to be preserved the way he had so carefully installed them. In Judd’s will, this was his wish; for the heirs it was a commandment. They had no choice, they felt, but to protect these spaces. Others with a stake in Judd’s career disagreed. Controversy has followed the artist posthumously, raising the question: What is the right way to steward an artist’s legacy when some of his most significant works are not objects that can be bought and sold?
Judd purchased 101 Spring Street for $68,000 in 1968, when the neighborhood—a warren of sweatshops and small factories—didn’t have a supermarket, let alone Stella McCartney. “There was no SoHo when Judd bought his building,” artist Carl Andre said. Working floor by floor, Judd transformed the building into a forceful expression of his aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, installing artworks and objects in harmony with the architecture.
Judd spent the final decades of his life in Marfa, however, leaving 101 Spring to languish, a Minimalist version of Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. Chunks of cast iron crumbled off the facade. Judd looked into repairing the structure in the early ’90s, but balked at the expense.
Judd’s children would realize the restoration their father could not. The siblings searched for the least invasive compromises possible, shackled to both building ordinances in a very different SoHo and to their father’s sometimes wildly impractical installations. Their adherence to his preferences was unbending and obsessive.
But the question was how to fund this extensive $23 million overhaul, which would include replacing the building’s 60 giant windows with UV- and temperature-regulating glass that still undulate like the original panes, and swapping the open spiral staircase corkscrewing through the space with an enclosed stairwell to meet modern fire codes. In order to create an endowment that would allow them to pursue grants and donations, Rainer and Flavin opted to consign to Christie’s 36 of Judd’s works, none of which had ever come to market. Twenty-five of them sold in a single evening auction in 2006.
The sale sparked fierce protest from people who had been close to Judd, including Stockebrand, who sat on the board of the Judd Foundation, and Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, which represented Judd at the time of his death.
“I didn’t like the idea [of selling] all those works at auction,” Stockebrand said. “I thought that it was too many and it came too quickly, and I resigned from the Judd Foundation board when that decision was made, because I didn’t want to be responsible for it.”
Glimcher agreed. “That auction got rid of all the best stuff in the inventory,” he said, naming Richard Schlagman, then the owner of Phaidon books and a foundation board member, as the architect of the sale. “I think Schlagman did a terrible job with the estate by getting rid of most of the works at bargain prices.” Some of those who had known Judd were relatively tolerant of the sale—New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, who worked for Judd briefly in the ’70s, wrote that he “might have viewed the sale with a certain pragmatic equanimity. . . . He remarked more than once that one purpose of his smaller, portable sculptures was to make money to pay for bigger projects.” Others thought that his children had carted off some of his best work—work that altered the course of art history—in favor of maintaining a shrine. The three-year restoration of 101 Spring Street was completed in 2013.
kind of creepy.”“It’s almost a little unpleasant,” said Paula Cooper, who represented Judd for six years before he left for Pace in 1991, of being inside the renovated building. “Maybe for those of us who knew him, it’s kind of creepy.”
Rainer and Flavin have given over their adult lives to their father, weathering criticism from those who, they say, don’t understand what Judd would have wanted. “Nobody whose opinion I respected opposed [the auction] so it wasn’t much of a problem for me,” Flavin said. If certain people in Judd’s cadre saw vultures circling around the Christie’s auction, Flavin has much the same opinion about the sale’s detractors. “When he died, there were already dark forces gathering,” said Flavin, conjuring wolfish bottom-liners who saw Judd’s properties and artwork as so many assets to be liquidated. “It was very obvious that the stupidity was at our doorstep,” he added. The Judd children saw themselves as the only thing standing between their father and prospectors looking to make a quick buck off Judd’s sizable reputation. “No, we didn’t think 22 years later we’d still be doing it,” Flavin said of the foundation. “But we’re not done yet.”
Financially, the Judd Foundation appears to be in good health. Its revenue was $5.4 million in the 2013 fiscal year, according to tax returns. The foundation’s director of operations, Richard Griggs, earned around $100,000; Rainer and Flavin each received salaries of roughly $150,000. The operating budget as of June 2016 was $3.1 million.
“There’s this weird, subtle, unspoken thing that we expect good people doing good things to be struggling financially . . . and I think we need to embrace good people [making] smart, wise business choices,” said Rainer. “Good people who are doing good things can be financially organized.”
Born in Missouri in 1928, Judd roared onto the New York art scene in the late 1950s. After receiving a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University, where he studied philosophy as an undergrad, the artist rapidly asserted himself as a vocal fixture in the downtown milieu. Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, Judd shaped the cultural discourse of his time—not only through his radical sculptures, but with his prolific writing on his peers. He championed the artists he admired (Yayoi Kusama, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg) and succinctly eviscerated those he did not. Judd espoused utter contempt for contemporary figuration, and he lambasted lazy art historians who lumped the new work he, Andre, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, and others were making under narrow terms of convenience like “Minimalism,” as they had lumped Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline under “Abstract Expressionism.” (Of the young painters who aped the Ab Ex titans, he wrote: “The situation is grotesque.”)
“[We were] not only hostile to postwar European art, but hostile to 10th Street art,” Stella said of his generation’s far-reaching belligerence toward members of the old guard and the avant-garde alike. “We were pretty hostile to just about everything.”
Judd preferred entertaining at home—the reverently preserved bottles at 101 Spring Street reflect his fondness for Scotch—but he occasionally hit Max’s Kansas City, the beloved downtown art bar, where Andre once watched him nearly come to blows with Robert Morris. “It was an incredibly fertile time,” said Andre.
Judd initially showed with Leo Castelli, the keen-eyed dealer who had championed Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Judd’s stark box sculptures, industrially fabricated from his own designs, eventually came to define the art being made in New York in the 1960s as much as Pollock’s drip paintings had the decade before. His success was hard-won, however. Describing a 1966 exhibition at Castelli, Hilton Kramer of the New York Times was in awe of Judd’s boldness (“it is work that consigns to the trash can of history most of our conventional beliefs about sculptural craftsmanship”), but also lamented “the sense of loss that one feels in seeing art carried to such an extreme of depersonalization.” No other artist of such renown had the “But is it art?” question lobbed his way more often than Judd. He left Castelli for the Paula Cooper Gallery, and had his first show there in 1985.
“We helped him be resuscitated,” Cooper said in her office, her hands resting on a pale Judd desk with built-in slots for papers. “He was respected, but his work was not selling at all, he wasn’t having museum shows. Nothing was happening, and we just believed so fervently in him.”
Cooper and Judd enjoyed a close friendship, frequently meeting for drinks and long talks about art and architecture. Despite his reputation for apoplectic rants, largely born out of his writing, he was soft-spoken in person. Videos show a pensive artist with a sense of humor, prone—as his children are—to studying patches of