For part II of the series of ‘Local History: Selections from Judd Foundation’s Photo Archive,’ we explore historic photos of La Mansana de Chinati/The Block. The bulk of the photos that demonstrate the development of La Mansana de Chinati/The Block during the 1970s and 1980s are represented in two collections of the Judd Foundation Archives, the Jamie Dearing Archive and the Lauretta Vinciarelli Archive.
To celebrate the publication of ‘Donald Judd Spaces,’ a visual survey of the homes, studios, and ranch houses of the artist Donald Judd in New York and Texas, this four-part Local History will explore selections from Judd Foundation’s archive of historic photos. Each of these four installments will focus on one space, beginning with photographic documentation of the development of 101 Spring Street.
Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011) was an architect, artist, and professor of architecture. Born in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome, she attended graduate school at the Università di Roma La Sapienza, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971.
In the late 1960s, Donald Judd travelled in the Southwest United States, throughout Arizona and New Mexico in search of a place that would be amenable to living and also allow him to work on a large-scale.
In 1990, Donald Judd purchased a two-story building on the main street of Marfa. He created a working architecture office on the first floor and made a space for living on the second floor, in which he installed with six lacquer paintings by the artist John Chamberlain and furniture by Alvar Aalto as well as furniture of his design.
In the summer of 1960, Donald Judd moved into a loft on 53 East 19th Street in New York City where he would live and work for nine years. 19th Street was where he wrote the majority of his early art criticism and where he made many of the paintings later included in 1975 catalogue raisonné.
In his 1986 essay, “On Furniture,” Donald Judd opens with the contention that furniture and architecture must be functional, as opposed to art, which is “the assertion of someone’s interest regardless of other considerations.”
Between the years 1967 and 1992, Donald Judd made eight different sets of works in editions ranging from three to two hundred. As diverse as his unique works in three dimensions, Judd’s works in editions were made for the floor, the wall, and the table in a range of materials: stainless steel, galvanized iron, cold-rolled steel, anodized aluminum, acrylic sheet, and wood.
Donald Judd studied painting at the Art Students League of New York from 1948 to 1953, his paintings from the mid-1950s onward saw a series of stylistic transitions. The oil paintings he made between 1956 and 1958 feature broad, irregular shapes that are neither strictly organic nor geometric. The paintings he made between 1959 and 1962 feature map-like planes and surfaces that emphasize texture through the addition of sand and wax.
In spring of 1968, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted a major exhibition of works by Donald Judd, the first in a series of exhibitions devoted to younger artists. Don Judd was curated by William C. Agee and was on view from February 27 to March 24, 1968.
Donald Judd amassed an impressive resume of writing as a for-hire art critic, often reviewing over 15 shows a month during a six-year period from 1959-1964. Although this period of Judd’s writing is notable for the categorical utterances housed within brief reviews that occasionally ran no more than five sentences long, it is also during this period that his penchant for the essay emerges in longer-form writings.
Donald Judd’s library at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block in Marfa, Texas demonstrates his extensive interest in Russian architecture; he collected over two dozen books on this topic. The bulk of his writing on Russian architecture appears after a January 1987 trip that he took with his son and daughter to the then Soviet Union, one of four he made during his lifetime.
Founded by Richard Bellamy, Green Gallery opened in 1960. In January 1963, just a few months after Donald Judd published “New York City-A World Art Center,” he exhibited three works in Green Gallery’s New Work: Part I exhibition, which also included work by Milet Andrejevic, Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Morris, Larry Poons, Lucas Samaras, and George Segal.
The fall of 1959 was significant for both Yayoi Kusama and Donald Judd; Kusama had her first solo show in New York City in at the Brata Gallery in October and Judd was hired to write reviews for ‘ARTnews’ in September.
In 1982, Donald Judd purchased Casa Perez, one of three ranch houses on the 40,000 acres of land that he collectively called Ayala de Chinati. Located forty-five miles from Marfa in southern Presidio County, Casa Perez ranch contains an adobe ranch house from the early twentieth century.
Exploring areas of the Southwest that might be suitable for developing his large-scale work, Donald Judd drove down from New York with his wife, Julie, and his son, Flavin in the summer of 1968. Finding Arizona too crowded and concerned that New Mexico would be too cold in the winter, he continued his search, traveling to the town of El Rosario in Baja California, Mexico.
In February 1989, Donald Judd joined the Board of Visitors of the McDonald Observatory. Established in 1933, it is one of the world’s leading centers for astronomical research situated in some of the darkest night skies in the continental United States. As a member of its Board of Visitors, Judd helped the McDonald Observatory raise funds for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope.
The development and production of Donald Judd’s furniture resulted partially from necessity.
His solution was to design very simple beds out of one-by-twelves, a cut of wood that with limited manipulation yielded simple, elegant, and functional construction. Shortly after, he began to design desks, shelves, tables, and chairs using this same standard unit of lumber.
As Donald Judd renovated the buildings at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block in Marfa, he designed furniture for the property, including an outdoor pergola and shelving for his extensive library; he also designed indoor and outdoor furniture for his ranch south of Marfa. By 1994, Judd had designed nearly one hundred pieces of furniture, as well as objects such as cups, saucers, and plates.
Donald Judd’s practice as a critic reflects the diversity of the curatorial interests of the early 1960s in New York, with reviews as wide-ranging as those on the work of Tao Chi, a Chinese landscape painter, calligrapher, and poet from the Ming Dynasty, to a review on the Inca of Peru.
In June 1970, ‘Artforum’ asked a number of artists to respond to the following question, “What is your position regarding the kinds of political action that should be taken by artists?” Responses from artists including Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd were published in the September 1970 issue of ‘Artforum’ under the title “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium.” Judd’s statement includes some of his most powerful political remarks.
Judd Foundation is pleased to present Local History, featuring findings from the Judd Foundation Archives. In this series, the Foundation will share visual and textual documentation of Donald Judd’s life and work contained within the Archives as a tool to understand the diverse range of his thinking. Selected to open Local History is a 1946 telegram which marks Judd’s first encounter with West Texas, a region that would become central to his life’s work