Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Donald Judd
American (1928-1994)
UNTITLED from Homage to Picasso (1976)
lithograph
22.25"x 29.75"

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO,
MINIMALISM

  

Donald Judd studied painting at the Art Students League and philosophy at Columbia University. He is one of the founding theorists of Minimalism. Initially a painter and art critic, Judd switched to sculpture in the sixties. During the sixties and seventies, he had a long series of solo exhibitions with Leo Castelli Gallery, where he showed industrial-derived works which used steel, concrete, and plywood to create large, hollow structures, usually in the form of boxes and rectangles. Judd has taught at Dartmouth and Yale, and has had many prestigious solo museum exhibitions as well as representing America at Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Judd moved to Marfa, Texas in 1972, where he created the Chinati foundation for his sculptures and the works of other artists. His work is in major museum collections worldwide.

Judd felt that painting and sculpture were depleted as possibilities for art-making. He wanted to make three-dimensional forms--what he called the "new work"--that would be three-dimensional, but bound by little else, especially illusion. He felt work should be reduced utterly to objecthood, and exist within the space of the viewer, with no bases or pedestals. Judd's print for the Homage to Picasso portfolio depicts the type of rectangular form he favored. There is no reference to Picasso (referentiality was never Judd's aim).

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Bruce Glaser, interview with Donald Judd and Frank Stella, Art News, 9/66
"DJ:..You see, the big problem is that anything that is not absolutely plain begs to have parts in some way. The thing is to be able to work and do different things and yet not break up the wholeness that a piece has...If my work is reductionist it's because it doesn't have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has elements that I like."
Michael Ennis, Texas Monthly, 4/03
"In scooping out space with a baking tin, Judd embarked on his lifelong exploration of a medium he described as 'neither painting nor sculpture.' An untitled 1962 floor piece consists of two wooden rectangles, painted an incandescent red and attached at right angles; with a bent, black-enameled metal pipe running between the two planes, the piece looks less like an unfinished box than an abstract painting opened like a popup book. A year later Judd made a complete red box and embedded a straight piece of pipe along its top; placed on the floor, the piece resembled one of Newman's paintings (typically, a single plane of color divided by a single contrasting stripe) materialized in 3-D. 'Three dimensions are real space,' Judd wrote. 'That gets rid of the problem of illusionism ... one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art.'"