Donald Judd

Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1989

This work is in good and sound condition overall. There are some very light and scattered surface abrasions visible under raking light and handling marks. The color of the lower boxes has faded irregularly and reveals variations in the red tone. For information on the potential to treatment to re-anodize the red boxes, please contact the Contemporary Department. Please note any treatment would the responsibility of the purchaser.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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As one of, if not the singular most important practitioner of what would come to be termed Minimalism (though he himself disdained the term), Donald Judd’s impact on the development of 20^th century art cannot be overstated. Catapulted to formal critical acclaim upon the debut of his first one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968, Judd would continue to hold the focus of the art community through his prolific practice and writing on art up until his passing in 1994. Spanning the seminal years during which the artist formulated his critical ideas about art and developed the fundamental forms and compositions that would occupy him throughout his oeuvre, the exhibition traced Judd's development since 1962. "Make no mistake about it...[Judd's show] constitutes a triumph for a difficult new order of art....The importance of the New York showing, the largest exhibition of his work to date, is that it gives the imprimatur of the establishment to a style which, if not so radically new as the claims made for it, is nonetheless significantly different from the forms of art that preceded it." (James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, New Haven, 2001, p. 248)

Elaborating on the idea of his rounded, “bullnose,” progressions first formulated in 1964, themselves an evolution of another earlier example of bisected iron pipe set into a box on the floor, Judd transformed the form from rounded to square and drastically elongated the entire composition. Unlike its square predecessor, To Susan Buckwalter, where the rectangular forms are all equal sized squares interspersed by vacant space of about one quarter the size of the square, Untitled consists of rectangular forms which grow in inverse relation to their voided space.  Following the Fibonacci sequence, a natural mathematical progression, the volumes of the forms grow accordingly: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc., each new space equaling the sum of the previous two. The solid form and empty space alternate and interact according to this mathematical sequence extending along the horizontal plane, and in so designing the form in such a way, Judd transferred the spatial play he had originally conceived of with the pipe on the floor into an altogether new wall form. In utilizing a regular, mathematical formulation, here the Fibonacci sequence, Judd was able to make an abstraction phenomenal and in so doing, manifest it now as a sort of material unto itself. 

Judd's realization that space is not discovered or identified, but rather "made by thought," catalyzed a new idea about objects and their relationship to abutting surfaces-neither propped by pedestals nor encircled by frames. Having famously sought to abandon any evidence of the authorial hand, Judd nevertheless has created a compelling visual object in its own terms.

Conflating rigorous geometric design and an a priori determined mathematical system, Untitled simultaneously conveys the artist's commitment to spectacular coloration.   Asserting its materiality and conceptual rigor, Untitled evinces a chromatic resonance in its lustrous surfaces and embedded coloration.  Color is the single-most telling aspect of Untitled as it is for his entire output.  As he said, "It's best to consider everything as color." (Judd in Exh. Cat., Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Donald Judd, 1989, p. 94) To address the issue of color in Judd's output is to read Judd's vibrant hues through the lens of Pollock, where color articulates the material surface, creating its singular presence, a presence that Judd found "could not be surpassed" in any artwork made after.

Color had become primary for Judd by 1960-62 in a series of line paintings, which for him clarified and isolated the single line created by Pollock's drips. Pollock was also vital to Judd's understanding of space and wholeness through "his specific use of color and materials" (Ibid., p. 81), that is to say, the precise physical nature of Pollock's drip. "The dripped paint in most of Pollock's paintings is dripped paint. It's that sensation, completely immediate and specific and nothing modifies it a totality much greater and unlike any of the parts." (Judd, "In the Galleries," Arts Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, March 1960, p. 55) In like manner, Judd conceived Pollock's color as an equally obdurate material presence, a single element in a reduced visual vocabulary. As Pollock joined color with facture, Judd would extend Pollock's "final statement on a flat surface. [For] color to continue [it] had to occur in space" (Judd in "Some Aspectsof Color in General and Red and Black in particular," p. 112)

What at first glance may appear quotidian in a sculpture by Donald Judd is in fact, far from it. Anodized aluminum becomes subservient to the tenets of a mathematical formula, in order to avoid subjective, 'expressive' qualities.  Space and coloration open up an entirely new artistic vision. The central subject of Judd's life-long practice is situated here, in a glorious statement in which "color and three-dimensional space are one." (Ibid., p. 111)