COLOUR
What you see is what you see Frank Stella
Just like Mondriaan, Donald Judd holds that in traditional art 'the necessities of representation inhibited the use of colour': Colour cannot be pure when shadows have to suggest rounding. And just like Mondriaan, Donald Judd concludes that the painter should concentrate on pure colour. He also refers to Frank Stella: 'What you see is what you see'.
No doubt, Donald Judd has brought colour back to where it has always been at home: in the domain of the ready-made colours of nature - from the green of the grass to the blue of the sky, not to mention the coloured patterns on flowers and animals - or the domain of the man-made colours with which man has of old embellished his furniture, his carpets, and the inner and outer walls of his houses.
And no doubt, colour 'works' in that domain of nature and man-made objects - the world of design. But it is not because someone makes colour 'speak' - produce whatever effect - that he is making art. Colour only comes to belong to the domain of art when it goes the opposite direction as the one that Mondriaan or Donald Judd had it walk: when the red that we see is no longer the red of paint on a carrier, but the blush on the cheek of a girl that is conjured up on a canvas. Despite Frank Stella: when 'you do not see what you see...'
And that cannot but draw our attention to the rather poor quality of Donald Judd's theorising. The red of a blush does not differ in principle from the red of a painted blush. What distinguishes a real blush from a painted one is not some characteristic of colour, but of the surface that reflects the colour: is it the skin of a cheek, then we are dealing with reality; is it paint on a canvas, then we are dealing with art (mimesis). It is a question of the transition from blood in skin to paint on canvas, hence, and not of the purification of colour by removing shadow.
And that catches the eye all the more, when we realise that the colour of real painted objects is not at all pure, unless the object is lighted with a constant artificial light from all sides, or when it is lighting itself, like Dan Flavin's neon tubes. That Donald Judd's rejection of shadows thus turns out to be a merely inappropriate way of rejecting mimesis as such, becomes fully apparent when we realise that the effect of many of his works depends precisely on the very presence of shadows and reflections of the colour of one surface on the other that he was so fiercely rejecting in 'illusionistic painting'!.
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