Donald Judd
Untitled, 1963

Cadmium red light oil on wood and purple enamel on aluminum
48 × 81 1/2 × 48 inches
(121.9 × 207 × 121.9 cm)

Artist
Type
Object 67
Date
1960s 72
Location

What Donald Judd described as “the first big piece” and the “first free, open, dimensional sculpture” was exhibited at Green Gallery, New York (Don Judd, December 17, 1963–January 11, 1964); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Don Judd, February 27–March 24, 1968, extended through April 14); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, October 18, 1969–February 8, 1970).1

Of his consistent use of red paint in the work he produced during this period, Judd said, “I like the color and I like the quality of cadmium red light,” adding,

I thought for a color it had the right value for a three-dimensional object. If you paint something black or any dark color, you can’t tell what its edges are like. If you paint it white, it seems small and purist. And the red, other than a gray of that value, seems to be the only color that really makes an object sharp and defines its contours and angles . . . the only point about the color was its capacity to define the form with clarity.2

1 “Don Judd: An Interview with John Coplans,” in John Coplans, Don Judd, exh. cat. (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 25.
2 Ibid., 25, 30.

Selected Bibliography

Kozloff, Max. “The Further Adventures of American Sculpture.” Arts Magazine, February 1965, 27 (ill.).

Coplans, John. Don Judd. Exh. cat. Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971, 25, 34 (plate 16). Reprinted: Coplans, John. “An Interview with Don Judd.” Artforum, Summer 1971, 42 (fig. 9), 43.

Smith, Brydon, ed. Donald Judd: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Objects, and Wood-Blocks 1960–1974. Exh. cat. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1975, 23, 112 (DSS cat. no. 35).

Agee, William C. The Sculpture of Donald Judd. Exh. cat. Corpus Christi: Art Museum of South Texas, 1977, 7–8.

Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, 52 (fig. 40), 56, 58 (fig. 45), 59 (fig. 47), 222.

Serota, Nicholas, ed. Donald Judd. Exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. no. 7; 135–36 (ill.), 173, 174–75 (cat. no. 7), 212.

Judd, Donald. Donald Judd Writings. Ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray. New York: Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, 2016, 905 (image 53).