Speeding in a pickup truck along an unpaved road in the Chihuahuan Desert, Flavin Judd, son of the late artist Donald Judd, lets out a hoot of delight as the horizon ahead is filled by the raw expanse of the Chinati Mountains. “This is why Don came to Texas,” he says. “Marfa”—the lonely cattle town that Judd transformed into an art pilgrimage site—“was really just a grocery store and a school for him.” Glimpsed through the cracked windshield are cattle grazing in fields dotted with cactus and buzzards soaring overhead. For the entire 90-minute drive, there’s not another car to be seen. Wearing a weather-beaten Stetson, denim jacket and cowboy boots, Flavin, 49, has inherited his father’s passion for this radical emptiness. The view is so poetic that he almost slows down. “This is the most dangerous stretch of road,” he notes at one point, as the speedometer hovers at 90 mph. “It’s where the deer hang out.” Laughing, he presses his foot to the pedal and breaks 100.
Behind a cattle gate stands Casa Perez, one of Donald Judd’s three ranches on the 40,000 acres of land that he collectively called Ayala de Chinati. Framed by the bluffs of the Pinto Canyon, the plain adobe structure was built in the early 1900s. Beneath the windmill sits a circular water tank with a wooden deck, where Flavin and his younger sister, Rainer, used to swim as kids. “Just watch out for rattlesnakes,” he says before pulling out an old key to unlock the metal grilles over the doors and windows.
Inside the two-bedroom ranch house, there is a sense of casual domesticity, as if Judd might have just stepped out on an errand—which in a sense is true, since he left Marfa on a trip to Germany in late 1993 with no idea that he was terminally ill with cancer and would never return. Next to the back door is a small bookshelf with tomes that reveal his myriad interests. ("A History of Ottoman Architecture, Gaudí, Birds of Texas, Stars and Planets.") As with all the buildings Judd acquired, he left the basic structure untouched but transformed the interior into a bright, open space. In this rustic isolation, it’s startling to see one of Judd’s signature box sculptures on the crisp white wall. During his 40-year career, he created over 3,000 artworks, most of them untitled, a catalog headache for curators. One renowned piece consists of 100 enormous milled-aluminum blocks displayed in two former artillery sheds at Marfa’s Chinati Foundation; his passion for the box was such that a popular bumper sticker souvenir reads I █ JUDD. No less striking is Judd’s own furniture. In the ranch house’s homey kitchen, where black frying pans hang over a rustic stove, stands a wooden counter he designed with the same clean, strong lines and rigorous craftsmanship as his sculpture. There is also a wooden daybed crafted in a raw style that has since been dubbed “Texas rough.” The sparse layout—the furniture is deliberately pulled away from the walls—makes the pieces seem like site-specific works. “Judd’s furniture was born of necessity, but each piece is a dissertation on proportion worthy of a Renaissance master,” says Michael Govan, CEO and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired, in conjunction with the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Garden, a desk and chairs Judd made for Flavin. “You could not ask for something more simple—the wood is still the same width as when it came from the lumberyard—but it is transformed by his compositional intelligence. It’s not as abstract as his art, since you actually sit on his chairs, but there is the same beauty.”
“I would put Judd’s furniture together with his sculpture, his writings, his houses,” says curator Ann Temkin, who is overseeing a major Judd retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when new construction there is complete. “The idea that a whole room would contain one simple steel box and Judd would consider it full has had a huge influence on the architecture and design world over the last 25 years.”
Despite the furniture’s influence, since Judd’s death in 1994, its availability for purchase has remained a well-kept secret in the art world. Over the years, almost every high-end design company on the planet has made offers to reproduce it, but the not-for-profit Judd Foundation—which was established upon the artist’s death to safeguard his property and artistic legacy and is overseen by Flavin and Rainer, 46—has always declined. Instead, it continued to produce his designs strictly on a made-to-order basis, resulting in the ultimate bespoke furniture: The metal pieces take 12 weeks to make in Judd’s foundry in Switzerland; the wooden versions, created mostly in California by one of Judd’s favorite craftsmen, Jeff Jamieson, take a minimum of 18 weeks. Each of Judd’s designs can be done in 21 colors of anodized aluminum or copper and a variety of woods—for a total of 345 combinations for metal or over 900 combinations for wood—which are listed in two fat binders kept in his former loft home in New York, 101 Spring Street, now a combination Judd Foundation office, museum and shrine. The popular daybed costs $12,600, while a wooden desk with chairs is $14,500. (The pieces produced when Judd was still alive, known to aficionados as “pre-’94” or “lifetime furniture,” are valued much higher, with some pieces fetching prices in the hundreds of thousands; one stainless-steel coffee table from the early ’70s sold at Sotheby’s in 2011 for $506,500.)
Starting next month, for the first time, the Judd Foundation is making available pieces that will be ready to purchase directly from inventory, meaning that impatient Judd fans can acquire them without a lengthy wait time. For the first release, the foundation selected the Corner Chair and the Library Stool as iconic pieces that Judd used in Marfa. More will be added each year. Anodized aluminum was chosen for the $6,900 Corner Chair, while the wood for the $1,900 Library Stool is pine, an homage to the first pieces Judd made in Marfa from the materials that were on hand. Also in May, an exhibition of Judd’s “pre-’94” furniture will be on view at the foundation’s New York headquarters at 101 Spring Street.
The renewed attention to Judd’s furniture provides more than just a curious footnote to the life of one of the 20th century’s most significant American artists. It also gives insight into his complex character and his grandiose vision in Marfa. “There was no separation between Judd’s art and life,” says Jenny Moore, director of the Chinati Foundation. According to his children, the desire to live with his own designs grew from his rejection of the strip-mall culture that he felt was being imposed on American society by corporations, along with a deluge of disposable, dispiritingly ugly objects. “Don took the way things looked seriously,” says Flavin. “There is a reason for everything, and it’s all interconnected.”
Judd bought 101 Spring Street in 1968 for a modest $68,000. Each floor of 101, as the 19th-century factory is familiarly known, has enormous windows and soaring ceilings, creating an exhilarating sense of space, within which every piece of furniture and art is meticulously placed. There is the same elegant morsa, or prosciutto holder, as in Marfa, the same Dean & Deluca olive oil bottles. It was here that Judd created his first piece of furniture in 1970, a bed built a few inches off the floor, despite the inconvenience for his then-wife, choreographer Julie Finch, who was pregnant at the time. “It was hell,” Finch says, laughing as she recalls having to roll over and make the bed before she got up, since she couldn’t reach it while standing. She never asked Judd why he had made it so low and large. “It was very elegant in the room. Why would he consult me? He was designing a bed!” Furniture was already a serious business: A fight over a brown corduroy sofa Finch bought from Bloomingdale’s was one of the most tumultuous in a volatile marriage, the kids remember. (The couch is still in their mother’s possession, they add. “It’s actually really nice,” Rainer says.)
In 1977, Judd made the move to Marfa. By then, he was renowned for his ever-more-monolithic abstract sculptures—he was only 39 when he had a major show at the Whitney—but had become disillusioned with the New York art scene, which he described as “harsh and glib.” In SoHo, gentrification had begun, galleries were sprouting, tourists were arriving in droves, and Judd, a shy man, found his celebrity a burden. Finch recalls people stopping him in the street to make comments. “There was a lot of envy of his fame,” she says. “Other artists were resentful. So he just stopped walking around SoHo.” On a creative level, Judd had rejected the gallery system, in which his work was shown only for a short time in less-than-ideal spaces and sometimes even damaged during installation. He had a vision of finding a remote site where his work could rest permanently.
The choice of West Texas has become part of the Judd legend. He first considered Baja California, and then turned to the high grasslands of Presidio County, the emptiest corner of Texas, which he had first seen in 1946 as a young G.I. on his way to Korea. (When the bus stopped in Van Horn, he famously sent a telegram to his mother: DEAR MOM VAN HORN TEXAS. 1260 POPULATION. NICE TOWN BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY MOUNTAINS LOVE=DON.) Twenty-five years later, in 1971, he came across Marfa by chance. “There was no plan,” Flavin says. (In one essay, Judd says that he might have chosen Australia had he visited it earlier.) When a military base, which had been set up in the early 1900s, and an Army airfield closed after World War II, Marfa lost perhaps half its population. Land and buildings were cheap, and Judd had funds.
In the following years, he bought eight properties within the town itself, including an abandoned bank, supermarket and beauty salon as well as the three ranches in brush country. Soon they were converted into his art studio, architecture office, galleries and library, employing over 50 people. None of these personal spaces were intended to be seen by the public. (“He was building it for himself,” Flavin says; his father was creating “different buildings for different parts of his brain. Think of Marfa as one big house with the structures as different rooms.”) The heart of this self-contained world was known as The Block, where Flavin and Rainer lived until high school. According to those who visited in the ’80s, there was a sense of entering a different dimension presided over by Judd. Locals still like to reminisce about the artist’s difficult ways, his drinking, his fits of fury, as well as his crackling intelligence and charm.
Not everyone was welcoming. West Texas was still trapped in the conservative ’50s, and many of the old rancher and Border Patrol residents looked askance at Judd’s ponytail and free-spirited family. (“We were the hippie, Commie f—s,” recalls Flavin.) Still, Judd moved to Marfa full time in 1977, coinciding with an acrimonious divorce with Finch that included Judd picking up the kids after school one afternoon in New York and whisking them to Texas, from where he conducted a custody battle that he ultimately won.
Rainer and Flavin are today so close that they sometimes seem like telepathic twins, finishing each other’s sentences or giving the punch lines to each other’s jokes. They grew up discussing philosophy around the dinner table in The Block and still enjoy bouncing abstract ideas back and forth, probing them with restless curiosity. They also have a playful sense of humor. For much of the time talking about their father (whom they have always called “Don” rather than “Dad”), they sit on a couch in a friend’s house playing with her son’s Legos, joking that they feel like they are in a therapy session. (Flavin, who is named for Judd’s close friend Dan Flavin, has three children with his wife Michèle—Miuccia, Lysandre, and Pascal—and is based in Los Angeles, while Rainer lives in New York.)
They explain that Judd’s decision to make furniture in Texas was a direct response to a practical need. “The furniture you could buy in Marfa was so, so, so, so, so bad that he couldn’t look at it,” says Rainer. Judd also reacted against his parents’ overstuffed suburban décor in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and yearned for the simplicity of his grandparents’ rural lifestyle. “They were farmers, so they just had the stuff they needed, damn it, and they weren’t going to pretend to be anything they weren’t,” Flavin says. One of Judd’s favorite dictums was, “A good chair is a good chair.”
When they moved to Marfa, Judd decided to make beds for the kids, among only a few pieces he built with his own hands. “He was not a natural carpenter,” says Rainer. “He was not what you would call a handy dude. But that allowed him to excel in collaboration. He was really good at getting people to trust themselves and use whatever craftsmanship they had, to take a risk.” Soon he hired two local brothers to execute his designs. Desks, daybeds, chairs, bookshelves and tables followed as he needed them.
Judd had already spent years studying “scale and proportion and harmony and even our needs in regard to light and space, the psychological effects of how much ceiling you have over you,” says Rainer. “He had a Ph.D. in all these subjects by the time he started making furniture.” Its popularity in art circles followed naturally as the first intrepid visitors to Marfa saw and admired the pieces. In 1984, Judd expanded into metal furniture, although he always distinguished between his art and the utilitarian pieces. These were not released in editions but were instead individually numbered and stamped, and unlike his immaculate artworks, they were made to be used and touched, gaining a patina of age.
It’s hard now to remember just how radical Judd’s furniture designs were at the time, inspiring several exhibitions during the ’80s and early ’90s in New York and Europe. Not everyone in the art world was adulatory; there was a sense that Judd was outside his field. “There was a whiny article,” Flavin recalls. “It was like: ‘We had to suffer through Dan Flavin’s drawings, and now we have to suffer through Donald Judd’s furniture.’ It was considered, ‘Why are you guys doing this? You shouldn’t be doing this—you’re artists!’ ”
But Judd approached the furniture with utmost seriousness. Govan recalls visiting him in Marfa in the early ’90s and seeing the latest drawings scattered across his desk. As with his art, the fabrication process itself was a key element. “Judd used materials straight from the factory—industrially produced materials—and added the quality of the handmade to them,” Govan says. (One of his most radical, and influential, innovations in the ’60s was to argue that an artist’s