Judd Foundation
Donald Judd
To Susan Buckwalter, 1964
Blue lacquer on aluminum and galvanized iron
30 × 141 × 30 inches
(76.2 × 358.1 × 76.2 cm)
“After I made the first works placed on the floor, knowing the new relationship to a surface,” Donald Judd wrote in 1993, “I didn’t think anything could be made which could be placed on the wall. Then I realized that the relationship to the wall could be the same as that to the floor. . . . My work on the floor was a new form, creating space amply and strongly. The relationship could be the same to the wall. It was necessary for the work to project sufficiently, at least as much as its height and width.”1
In January 1965, Judd dedicated this work to Susan Buckwalter, a collector of contemporary art from Kansas City, Missouri, who had recently passed away. The four galvanized units are spaced evenly with an interval measuring approximately one quarter of their width. A square aluminum tube, lacquered Harley-Davidson Hi-Fi Blue, spans all four units, across the front, at the top.
Judd installed this work in one of the two rooms of his library, on the same wall as Dan Flavin’s alternate diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd), from the same year.
1 Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular” (1993), in Donald Judd Writings, ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New York: Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, 2016), 841.
Selected Bibliography
Rose, Barbara. “ABC Art.” Art in America, October/November 1965, 63 (ill.).
Agee, William C. “Unit, Series, Site: A Judd Lexicon.” Art in America, May/June 1975, 44.
Smith, Brydon, ed. Donald Judd: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Objects, and Wood-Blocks 1960–1974. Exh. cat. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1975, 122 (DSS cat. no. 56).
Serota, Nicholas, ed. Donald Judd. Exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, 182–83 (cat. no. 11), 192, 196.
Raskin, David. Donald Judd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, 33.