THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 83
in early writings and interviews, preach-
ing a chastened aesthetic that should be
“non-naturalistic, non-imagistic, non-ex-
pressionist,” in addition to “unrelational,”
“nonillusionistic,” and “neither painting
nor sculpture.” That dispenses with an
awful lot of what normally appeals to
people about art, leaving, in my case, a
state of chilled awe. The one solid plea-
sure still provided is that of decoration:
art that is meant not to be looked at but
to be seen in relation to the environ-
ments that it enhances—keeping in mind
that Judd’s ideal environments are voids.
(Come to that, we owe to Minimalism
the stubborn fashion in architecture and
design of hygienically spare, white-walled
interiors and sleekly simplified commod-
ities.) Success did not mellow him. Nor
was he much given to humor. His state-
ment of purpose, in 1986, for the Chi-
nati Foundation, which he instituted for
Marfa, admits no doubt about the gran-
deur, and the grandiosity, of his enter-
prise: “Somewhere, just as the plati-
num-iridium meter guarantees the tape
measure, a strict measure must exist for
the art of this time and place.” Visiting
those places, you’re not an art lover. You’re
a pilgrim.
J
udd was born in 1928 in Excelsior
Springs, Missouri, the son of a West-
ern Union executive. In 1948, after Army
service, he began studies that led to a de-
gree in philosophy and—but for a the-
sis—one in art history, from Columbia
University. His early work evolved from
so-so abstract painting to such tentative
three-dimensional experiments as the re-
lief of a yellow, concave, plastic letter from
a sign embedded in a Masonite panel
painted cadmium red light (a favorite
Judd hue). Manually, he was a klutz.
Nothing quite fits in his initial construc-
tions, and his drawing style is rudimen-
tary. His first really strong works—wood-
blocks, from 1961, of tine-like vertical
stripes contained by a diagonal shape—
were executed by his father, Roy (who
co-signed the backs). Starting in 1964,
almost everything Judd made was com-
mercially fabricated. He was a thinker
and a designer of far-seeing intellect and,
if you will, profound taste. Indeed, his
main holdover from modernism was a
high seriousness in matters of discrimi-
nation, asserting preferences as gauges
of integrity that expand beyond the aes-
thetic to the moral. You can’t know now
from looking only at his work that his
politics were left-libertarian, but he
seemed sure that sophisticated viewers
would implicitly understand his stance.
The populism of Andy Warhol repelled
him, but he found Roy Lichtenstein’s
formal prowess “hugely satisfying.”
Judd’s extraordinary connoisseurship
shines in the reviews he wrote—some
six hundred of them—between 1959 and
1965, most for Arts Magazine. Gathered
in a cherishable book, “Donald Judd:
Complete Writings 1959-1975,” they com-
bine lucid description and fearless judg-
ment in a bracingly forthright, no-non-
sense style that makes other critics of the
time, and most of us since then, seem
flabby by comparison. Almost always,
when an artist is familiar to me Judd’s
assessment is penetrating and dead-on
correct, while never gentle. (Imagine
being Charles Cajori, a fair-to-middling
second-generation Abstract Expression-
ist, and reading a review of your work
that begins “The color is gray, varied
some, and a little grayed blue and or-
ange. It could not be less considered.”)
Judd’s later writing, from the seventies
to the nineties, runs to jeremiads against
the thick-headedness and what he deemed
the incompetence of art-world institu-
tions. He regularly had good reason to
complain of damage to his works re-
turned from museum shows. Minimal-
ist art was long vulnerable to art han-
dlers and viewers who barely saw it as
art, and to children who mistook it for
playground equipment. Absolute phys-
ical perfection, destructible by a nick or
a fingerprint, is as essential to Judd’s aes-
thetic as it was, before him, to Brancusi’s,
and, more recently, to that of Jeff Koons.
A wonderment of the MOMA show
is that it is installed with no physical,
or even indicated, barriers. Temkin,
fingers crossed, acknowledged to me
that the presence of the works would
be compromised otherwise. It’s worth
pausing to note that probably only
MOMA commands the clout, the cash,
and the expertise to gather, from many
collections, the number and quality of
so many fragile treasures. The chance
surely won’t recur to take the measure—
platinum-iridium grade or not—of an
artist whose influence on our art and,
sub rosa, our lives in common, remains
beyond large, engulfing. SHOWCASE
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