Works featured

Untitled 1962
Light cadmium red oil on liquitex and sand on masonite with yellow Plexiglas
122 x 243.8 x 7 cm
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bequest of Phyllis Wattis

Untitled 1963
Light cadmium red oil on wood with iron pipe
56.2 x 115.1 x 77.5 cm
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1991

Transcript

Judd began painting in the late ‘40s, through the ‘50s he was painting very abstracted landscapes looking at the work of artists like Stuart Davis, looking at de Kooning and others but steadily trying to remove from his paintings any sense of expression or composition and the painting behind me is in a way one of the first which show him moving into what one would now recognise as his own vocabulary, he took away imagery, he tried to take away composition, he tried to reduce painting to its basis elements of colour on a flat surface and yet at the same time to try and introduce some sense of depth, so what you find is Donald Judd taking a plastic letter, a Plexiglas letter from a shop sign, turning it on its side, using it to create depth and giving colour in the substance of the material itself and then using this extraordinary cadmium, light cadmium red as the ground for the painting.

I think one of the most remarkable aspects of Judd’s career, as you see it in this show, is the very rapid way in which he moved from painting with depth into three dimensions, this box in front of me is one of the first and its an exploration of the sense of the cube, the volume….this pipe which he found on Canal Street, is another example of him taking a found object and incorporating it into his work, trying to find something in the world that helped to determine the size, shape and form of the art object that he was attempting to make rather than taking something from the natural world, or taking something from his head and inventing, he was essentially trying to make something that was real in the world and based in that world and not something that was artificial.

The combination of materials is something that is characteristic of Judd’s work throughout, sometimes those combinations are very subtle, a polished aluminium as against an anodised aluminium, sometimes as here, they’re quite sharp in their distinctions, between a bright colour and a dull material but he was extremely interested in exploring the possibilities of material….if you went to his studio you would find a whole range of materials laid out with small panels and samples sitting on the work benches, he loved the way material literally felt between your fingers I think and also of course the way it reflected light.

When Judd selected this cadmium red light, he chose it because he found it to be a colour that absorbed light that certainly in three dimensional form was very precise in showing the edges of his boxes to show and register the distinction of the form but at the same time he found that it was a colour that had a sense of all-over ness, as he put it, it was somehow a single volume, it unified the surfaces and it was a colour which he used again and again.