Sold at Auction: Donald Judd

(b Excelsior Spring, Missouri, 1928; d Marfa, Texas, 1994) American sculptor. Born Donald Clarence Judd, the artist served in the United States Army in Korea, then attended The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia; the Art Students League and Columbia University in New York, where he received a B.S. in Philosophy in 1953. In 1964, upon seeing Dan Flavin’s neon tubes on exhibition, he admired the simplicity of the light tubes that made "an intelligible idea of the whole wall.” From the late 1960’s to the late 1970’s, Judd’s stacked rectangles, made with industrial materials and colored Plexiglas, demonstrated the simplicity and elegance of mathematical language that would characterize his subsequent work. Industrially produced with only pure, cold and impersonal industrial materials, he achieved the absolute precision necessary for his work to be seen purely for what it was, not for the craftsmanship or means by which it had been made. The Plexiglas exposes the interior of the forms, making it less mysterious, less ambiguous. The colored Plexiglas is able to create a colored light effect in the empty space between the metal boxes, uniting the work into a single radiating column of color, alternating solid metal with empty colored light, and determining the overall feeling (or even mood) of the work. The stacks are a harmonious expression of Judd’s complex aesthetic that changed the course of sculpture. Judd received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Swedish Institute, and the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. (Credit: Christie’s New York, Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, November 13, 2007, Lot 32).