Several decades on, the art of Donald Judd is still stunning. In the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that opened March 1, smartly curated by Ann Temkin, Yasmil Raymond, Tamar Margalit, and Erica Cooke, all the work looks fresh (kudos to the conservators), but the early paintings and objects are especially vivid. The intensity of the cadmium red, often made tactile by roughened surfaces of board and wood. The physicality of the specific shapes, such as a yellow oval affixed to the support or a tin pan embedded there. The first tentative move into actual space with a painting whose aluminum top and bottom curl outward toward us. And then the initial objects, cut in sharp geometries, set boldly on the floor without pedestal or plinth.
Also very impressive, the second gallery presents several pieces Judd exhibited in his first solo museum show in 1968 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At this point, he had already begun to repeat elements, as in his “stacks,” which consist of identical shelves set on a wall at regular intervals from floor to ceiling, as well as in his “channels,” which are comprised of rectangular frames spaced on the floor so as to describe a perfect square. Represented here, too, are other familiar series, such as his “progressions,” which are made of box and bullnose units sized and arranged along horizontal bars according to mathematical orders like the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.). The second gallery marks a shift in production from the homemade work of the early 1960s, when his father, a skilled carpenter, assisted Judd, to the pieces fabricated later in the decade in iron, stainless steel, brass, aluminum, and Plexiglas by sheet-metal specialists. Some of these objects have a fragile finish that in the ’70s Judd offset with pieces in unpainted plywood, which recovered the crafted hardiness of the early work and allowed him to go larger than he had heretofore.
Along with a few other templates, Judd turned these series into a basic language that he deployed in different materials, colors, and sizes for the next two decades of his life, excellent instances of which are displayed in the third gallery. The fourth gallery of the exhibition is dominated by pieces that represent a final twist in his practice. In 1984, Judd began to collaborate with a Swiss fabricator that helped him assemble long blocks of color units in enameled aluminum. This is Judd at his most pictorial (the blocks are often set on the wall); the random combinations of colors might call up the grids of Ellsworth Kelly or even the charts of Gerhard Richter. This is also Judd at his most free; the work has little of the asperity usually associated with “late style,” but then Judd died prematurely, felled by cancer in 1994 at the age of sixty-five.
With Judd it is impossible to separate the artist from the critic, and some of his words remain as forceful as most of his objects. “Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture,” he stated in the famous first lines of “Specific Objects” (1965). “Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative.” Although Judd appeared to dismiss painting in toto—“The main thing wrong” with it, he remarked in his usual deadpan, “is that it is a rectangular plane faced flat against the wall”—it was Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt who prompted his shift into three dimensions. Along with a commitment to large scale, unmodulated color, and emphatic materiality, their painting mandated a “sense of singleness” for Judd, who felt that this “wholeness” had “a better future” outside that medium.1