Prints: 1992

This edition of twenty woodcut prints, comprised of ten pairs, is one of the largest series of prints made by Judd. Each pair has one impression with a printed frame of color and one where the same color is reversed and printed as the interior space of the frame. The dividing vertical and horizontal lines are specific to each pair, creating proportions of 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, and 1:5. The grain of the mahogany block is a prominent element of the large blocks of color. Whereas in his earlier prints Judd regularly printed in one or two colors, by the mid-1980s he began using multiple colors in his woodcuts. He made a similar shift towards the use of numerous colors in his three-dimensional work in the early 1980s with the development of pieces in painted aluminum. This set of prints reflects Judd’s most extensive use of color in his print practice, with ten colors used across the set: cadmium red, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cobalt blue, permanent green, viridian green, black, and alizarin crimson.

Judd made his first prints in 1951 while studying at the Art Students League in New York. Working first with lithographs, woodcuts became his dominant print medium as early as 1953. Judd also worked with aquatint, etching and screen print techniques, often using multiple techniques to create prints with similar formal qualities. He used the parallelogram, for example, in his three-dimensional works, woodcuts, etchings, and aquatints. Judd’s prints, like his works in three-dimensions, explore symmetry, proportion, seriality, and color combinations. As he wrote in his 1985 essay, “Symmetry,” the distinction between symmetry and asymmetry arose in his work when the lines of his painting and prints which had been organic, and then curved, later became straight. “This change divided a painting into two parts, the large broad rectangle and the narrow lines,” creating “the problem of where to place them.” Over time, the question of line and symmetry became central to Judd’s print practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Judd’s prints concentrated on monochromatic series. In 1986, Judd developed a set of four woodcuts with a rectangular field of color printed in brown, blue, red, and green – the first set to contain multiple colors. Each sheet measured 60 x 80 cm, a 3:4 ratio that he worked with consistently from then on. As Marietta Josephus Jitta editor of the catalogue raisonné, Donald Judd: Prints and Works in Editions, wrote in the essay “On Series” in that volume, “The series has something of a declaration. It is simple and almost challenging like the red and blue parallelogram of twenty years earlier. In his graphical work, the series is continually referred to as the basis for new research on the flat surface.” Many of Judd’s later prints, including untitled, 1992-93, on view in this exhibition, built upon the formal innovation of the central rectangle of color first used in 1986.