There is a beautifully complex language of materials to savor in a survey of the artist’s work at MoMA. It’s his first U.S. survey in over 30 years.
I wonder if it even occurs to young artists in the globalist, pluralist present to try to stake out a spot in art history by changing the way history goes. Donald Judd, pioneer of the 1960s movement called Minimalism (the label wasn’t his; he hated it), thought about this constantly. He wanted, right from the start, to be a big art deal, a super influencer. Long before his death in 1994, at 65, he was.
Major American and European museums owned his work. His signature sculptural image — a no-frills, no-content wood or metal box —had not only been adapted by other artists, but also riffs on it became a fixture of international architecture and design. To some degree, we all lived in Judd-world, and still do.
Yet over time, Judd himself seems to have retreated from view. The survey of 70 works that opens at the Museum of Modern Art on March 1 is the first in New York in more than 30 years. It’s a fine show: carefully winnowed, persuasively installed, just the right size. Its one-word title, “Judd,” suits the artist’s view of his wished-for, worked-for place in history: so assured as to need neither qualifiers nor explanations.
The big, and maybe only surprise, particularly for Judd skeptics, is how really beautiful some of the art looks, how poetic, and mysterious. These were qualities that Judd himself, at least when he was starting out, would not have wanted applied to his work, which in the 1950s was painting. Beauty and mystery belonged to the art of yesterday. His was an art of today, a today that he kept close tabs on as a busy New York art critic in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Writing led him to network widely in the contemporary art world. It allowed him to observe its career-making machinery in action, and to consider how to position himself within it. His reviews — listy, pontificating, proscriptive — were a form of self-advertising that also served as a useful means of self-critique.
Through evaluating the work of hundreds of other artists, many his generational peers, he came to see that his own paintings — two examples introduce the MoMA show — were not, and would never be, strong enough to take him in the history-making direction he aspired to. He had to go another, less conventional way, and around 1960, he began to make work that was like no other art around.