82 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
“Untitled,” from 1967. Judd ’s objects expose and flavor the space they inhabit.
THEA RT WORLD
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Donald Judd in retrospect.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
COURTESY MOMA © 2020 JUDD FOUNDATION / ARS, NEW YORK
I
would tell you my emotional responses
to the gorgeous works in the Donald
Judd retrospective that has opened at the
Museum of Modern Art if I had any. I
was benumbed, as usual, by this last great
revolutionary of modern art. The boxy
objects (he refused to call them sculp-
tures) that Judd constructed between the
early nineteen-sixties and his death, from
cancer, in 1994, irreversibly altered the
character of Western aesthetic experi-
ence. They displaced traditional contem-
plation with newfangled confrontation.
That’s the key trope of Minimalism, a
term that Judd despised but one that will
tag him until the end of time. In truth,
allowing himself certain complexities of
structure and color, he was never as rad-
ically minimalist as his younger peers
Dan Flavin (fluorescent tubes) and Carl
Andre (units of raw materials). But Judd,
a tremendous art critic and theorist, had
foreseen the change (imagine, in theatre,
breaking the fourth wall permanently)
well before his first show of mature work,
in 1963, when he was thirty-five. Slowly,
by erosive drip through the nineteen-
sixties and seventies, the idea that an ex-
hibition space is integral to the art works
that it contains took hold. It is second
nature for us now—so familiar that en-
countering Judd’s works at moma may
induce déjà vu.
We are talking about, for example, an
untitled piece from 1964: a wall-mounted,
square-sectioned, polished brass tube,
seven feet long, from which descend five
vertical tubes in iron, lacquered blue. Of
the same vintage, there’s a rectangular
box, almost four feet long, with a top and
sides of translucent orange Plexiglas and
ends of hot-rolled steel. The works reg-
ister as material propositions of certain
principles—chiefly, openness and clar-
ity. They aren’t about anything. They
afford no traction for analysis while mak-
ing you more or less conscious of your
physical relation to them, and to the
space that you and they share. As in-
stalled by the curator Ann Temkin, with
perfectly paced samples of Judd’s major
motifs—among them, floor-to-ceiling
“stacks” of shelflike units, mostly of metal-
framed, tinted Plexiglas, which expose
and flavor the space they occupy—the
second of the show’s four big rooms
amounts to a Monument Valley of the
minimalist sublime. Don’t miss it. Less
enchanting, though expertly appointed,
are a room of tentative early work and
two that feature such later developments
as boothlike, angled constructions, at
joins of wall and floor, in raw plywood;
large aluminum boxes containing differ-
ently oriented, lushly colored sheets of
Plexiglas; and a huge congeries, nearly
six feet high by more than twenty-four
feet long, of stacked, bolted, and multi-
colored horizontal aluminum open boxes.
Not represented are Judd’s curatorial
adventures, which included an exqui-
sitely revamped building at 101 Spring
Street, where he lived for a time and ex-
perimented with ways of installing art.
It has been preserved as a museum. Then
came the artist’s Bayreuth, his Mecca,
in the remote (from anywhere!) desert
town of Marfa, West Texas. There, start-
ing in 1971, he converted old military,
civic, commercial, and domestic build-
ings to house permanent and temporary
installations of his work, that of artists
he favored, and his collections of Na-
vajo blankets and other choice craft ob-
jects. He also created studios, guest quar-
ters, and his own living space, tucked
into one end of a former gymnasium.
Works by Judd are almost routinely
beautiful, but coldly and even imperi-
ously so, as if their quality were none of
your business. If you have any feeling, it
might be chagrin at being underqual-
ified to cope with so rigorous a visual
intelligence. He’s Donald Judd; you’re
not. He came on as a Savonarola of art
