Title: Donald Judd: The Early Works 1955-1968
Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Edition: 1st
184 pages with 80 illustrations in color. Hardcover, bound in printed orange paper covered boards and issued without a dustjacket. Black endpapers. Pristine content. Text in English. Published on the occasion of the exhibition from 5 May-21 July 2002 in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and from 31 January-27 Aprl 2003 at the Menil Collection, Houston. Includes Appendix; List of Plates. Catalogue of Works in the Exhibition and Drawings from the Collection of the Judd Foundation, Marfa Texas. With hundreds of pages of new and previously unpublished essays, notes, and letters, Donald Judd Writings is the most comprehensive collection of the artist s writings assembled to date. This timely publication includes Judd s best-known essays, as well as little-known texts previously published in limited editions. Moreover, this new collection also includes unpublished college essays and hundreds of never-before-seen notes, a critical but unknown part of Judd s writing practice. Judd s earliest published writing, consisting largely of art reviews for hire, defined the terms of art criticism in the 1960s, but his essays as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, published here for the first time, contain the seeds of his later writing, and allow readers to trace the development of his critical style. The writings that followed Judd s early reviews are no less significant art-historically, but have been relegated to smaller publications and have remained largely unavailable until now. The largest addition of newly available material is Judd s unpublished notes transcribed from his handwritten accounts of and reactions to subjects ranging from the politics of his time, to the literary texts he admired most. In these intimate reflections we see Judd s thinking at his least mediated a mind continuing to grapple with questions of its moment, thinking them through, changing positions, and demonstrating the intensity of thought that continues to make Judd such a formidable presence in contemporary visual art. Edited by the artist s son, Judd Foundation curator and co-president Flavin Judd, and Judd Foundation archivist Caitlin Murray, this volume finally provides readers with the full extent of Donald Judd s influence on contemporary art, art history, and art criticism. The work of Donald Judd (1928 1994), one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, has come to define what has been referred to as minimalist art a label to which the artist strongly objected on the grounds of its generality. The unaffected, straightforward quality of Judd s work demonstrates his strong interest in color, form, material, and space. With the intention of creating work that could assume a direct material and physical presence without recourse to grand philosophical statements, he eschewed the classical ideals of representational sculpture to create a rigorous visual vocabulary that sought clear and definite objects as its primary mode of articulation.