BOXES
'Il faut être un homme vivant et un artiste posthume' Jean Cocteau, Le rappel à l’ordre.
From 1947 to 1953 - in the heydays of the very 'abstract expressionism' that soon will be promoted as the panacea of the Free World with a little help from the CIA* - Donald Judd studied at Art Students League in New York, the College of William and Mary and the Columbia University. Meanwhile, he is already fully active as an art critic and a painter. Already in 1957, he has his first show in the Panoramas Gallery - although from the paintings exhibited there no trace is to be found in what is announced as the 'first full retrospective'. But things are not going well with the Action Painting in New York. Andy Warhol comes to replace Jackson Pollock. Accordingly, the expressionistic gestures on Judd's canvasses are replaced with a baking tin (1961). 'Illusionism' is said to be banned in favour of the real two-dimensional surface or the equally real three-dimensional space.
Donald Judd's stride from 'painting' to 'sculpture' is to be understood in the broader perspective of the more general anti-mimetic trend, here in the disguise of anti-illusionism. Already with his ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp had replaced painting - bluntly dismissed as mere illusionism - with real three-dimensional objects. Such dadaistic gesture has been renewed in 1960 by the Nouveaux Réalistes of Pierre Restany and in 1967 by the Arte Povera of Germano Celant (see also Kounellis**). With Donald Judd, however, we are dealing neither with real cars like those of Arman, nor with real horses like those of Kounellis**. The reason is that Donald Judd rather joins another anti-mimetic trend: the new geometric abstraction ('hard edge') of painters like Barnet Newmann, Ad Reinhardt en Frank Stella, who wanted to break with the 'abstract expressionism' from the school around Pollock and De Kooning. While Andy Warhol followed the example of Duchamp, they walk in the footsteps of the old geometric abstraction. And here we find an equally strong radicalism: even the last traces of 'illusionism', such as the overlap in Mondriaan's pictures, are eliminated: on the flat plane of the canvas equally flat surfaces are bluntly juxtaposed. After such reduction of the 'illusionistic' canvas to a two-dimensional plane, only the reduction of the sculpture to a mere non-illusionistic object in real space is left - providing the geometrically painted surface with a real third dimension in the vein of Rietveld who made three-dimensional architectural versions of Mondriaan or of Lissitzky who made three-dimensional versions of his own paintings
Donald Judd takes the stride outside the canvas with his 'stack sculptures'. While Carl André laid bricks on a row in 1964, Donald Judd aligned boxes on a wall from 1966 onward (an 'abstract' echo of Warhol's Brillo boxes of 1964?). He repeats this theme in ever changing colours, sizes and materials.
What is presented as a revolutionary stride in the development of sculpture, makes the artist, who nearly started painting, famous at once. Already in 1968 a retrospective (!) is dedicated to his work in the Whitney Museum of American Art. and via a big show of minimalists in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1971 Donald is featured in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and the Dokumenta in Kassel in 1982. However much he is celebrated in the galleries and the museums, Donald Judd wants to have his works exhibited properly in an appropriate museum of his own already during his life-time. In 1972 he moves to Marfa in Texas where in 1986 a renovated complex is opened to exhibit his works and that of other artists such as Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg en Dan Flavin.
Let us have a closer look at his work.
[ next ] composition