Book Description
Like no other sculptor today, Donald Judd has informed our understanding of art and its relationship to space. The Panoramas Gallery organized his first solo exhibition in 1957, at a time in which he was still focused on painting, yet moving from the flat picture plane towards the third dimension. His cadmium red pictures cut through with stripes or incisions led the viewer to perceive space as self-evident. From there Judd moved toward a complete abandonment of painting, recognizing, in the early 60s, that "actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface." His switch from painting to sculpture was coincident with a growing interest in architecture and in industrial processes and materials, such as galvanized steel, concrete, plywood, and aluminum, which he used to create large, hollow, Minimalist sculptures. Documented here for the first time is this very crucial development, from the early work of the 1950s to 1968, the point at which Judd's artistic vocabulary reached its complete formation. Numerous works, including previously unrecorded paintings, sculptures, sketches, and works on paper, appear here alongside unpublished documents and texts by Judd himself. Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all. --Donald Judd, 1965 Edited and with an essay by Thomas Kellein. Texts by Donald Judd. Hardcover, 184 pages, 80 color

About the Author
Donald Judd was born in 1928 in Missouri. A painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, art critic, and philosopher, he was one of the foremost practitioners of Minimalism, which had its apex in the late 1960s and early 70s. In 1949 he moved to New York to study philosophy at Columbia University and attend art classes at the Art Students League. At the end of the 50s he began to show his work and to write articles for art magazines. The first retrospective of his work was mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1968, and has since been followed by exhibitions in most major art museums around the world. In 1971, Judd acquired an unused army base in Marfa, Texas, where the Chinati Foundation now exhibits his and other contemporary works both permanently and temporarily. The artist died in 1994 in New York.