From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Several years before Donald Judd established himself as one of the leading exponents of minimalism, he painted an intriguingly unresolved picture. It was 1957, and he was moving between cheap apartments in New York. He had studied philosophy at Columbia University, he was returning there to pursue an MA in art history, and he had trained more informally as a painter at the Art Students League. He had also served with the US Army in Korea, which likely explains the picture’s title, A Defile, a word that can describe troops marching in a column, or a narrow passageway between mountains or hills. The painting isn’t Abstract Expressionist – which was then the reigning doctrine in New York – but neither is it geometric, nor Op, nor some Jasper Johns mode of proto-Pop. But in its purely abstract arrangement of subtly sliding planes and its spatial ambiguity, you sense a young painter fully in charge of their medium, even if they haven’t yet found their compass.
Judd knew it was a success and he donated it to what is now the Staten Island Museum – the first of his pictures to enter a public collection. The picture is just like the good work of thousands of other talented young artists: you sense they are inches from some powerful mature style, some career-defining problem. Maybe they’ll reach it tomorrow, or maybe never.
Of course, Judd reached it, and then some. By 1963 he was a minimalist, making what he called ‘objects’. These odd, unsettling things had no plinths, they didn’t appear to represent or allude to anything and seemed insistently real, part of the ordinary object-world around us. The question of how he got there has always been intriguing, like following the knight’s moves that led Picasso to cubism or Pollock to the drip technique.
A new publication covering his work in the years 1957–63 offers some illumination. It’s published by Gagosian, which has represented the artist’s estate since 2021; that his juvenilia is getting this treatment is a confirmation of his commercial and canonical stature. For sure, there are bad paintings here, but there are rarely two exactly alike and that’s a sign of a guiding intelligence, Judd finding his way, gaining his bearings and moving on. The pictures are hard to characterise, being not quite anything at all, a little post-cubist, a touch post-Surrealist. You feel the proximity of Judd’s milieu – Color Field painting, hard-edge abstraction – but it’s all kept at arm’s length while he ploughs his own furrow.
Judd’s early years have been hitherto better known through his art criticism. He wrote some 600 reviews from 1959–65, mostly to pay bills, but they undoubtedly sharpened his discernment. Some of the best writing on Judd is by Alex Potts and it often proceeds by mining the artist’s own statements over several decades, attesting to the fact that he didn’t look, or write, without penetrating thought and consistency. Judd’s foundational formal training was outside fine art: he was typical of a rising generation who came to art practice from beyond its precincts. That might explain why, in eventually lighting on ‘objects’, Judd was so happy to break with the then doctrinaire conventions of both painting and sculpture. Yet his identity as a painter remained important to him and, of minimalism’s object-makers, he was among the most painterly – closer to the light and colour of Dan Flavin than to the spatial, sculptural concerns of Robert Morris.
In an essay, Eileen Costello gives an overview of the early years. Inevitably, she lands on Frank Stella’s Black Paintings (1958–60), those seminal pinstripe grids. Judd, never known for humility, said of them that they were ‘sort of a confirmation of an idea I already had’. Did he? Maybe it felt that way, retrospectively: Judd was also seeking a coolness and dispersed composition in his pictures, though it’s hard to imagine minimalism coalescing quite as it did without the impetus of Stella’s geometry.
More interesting are the passages in the later essays that depict Judd from oblique angles. Lynn Zelevansky remarks on his taste for small-government libertarianism: it illuminates his famous departure to Marfa in Texas in 1977, where he became an unlikely small-town potentate, but it also makes you ponder where Judd stood – and along with it his personal style – in the anti-war era when political positions were inescapable. Zelevansky also writes at length about his friendship with and admiration for Yayoi Kusama, which is a useful corrective to the notion that minimalism was just about geometry.
The style as we know it today is really the creation of the ‘Primary Structures’ show at the Jewish Museum in 1966, a grand curatorial success which, nevertheless, unhappily separated the hard-edged work from diverse but allied work like that of Kusama, work that the critic and curator Lucy Lippard called ‘eccentric abstraction’. Apparently, Judd spent days stuffing material into the phallic protrusions covering Kusama’s early sculpture: it’s more than an amusing anecdote, because it encourages us to entertain Judd and Kusama in the same category, something that requires a leap of imagination.
Judd is difficult enough as it is, the work so mute and recalcitrant, so much like the world of ordinary objects that to demand that it render up clear messages feels like expecting your dining-room table to give spiritual guidance. Some of the most helpful and peculiarly accurate things said about minimalism are often the simplest: Dan Graham once described the style as ‘sexy and stupid’. When I took some students to the Dia galleries in upstate New York last year, one remarked – standing before a fence-like construction by Judd – ‘It makes me feel weird, and I don’t know why.’ It was a valuably honest and properly tentative response to work that remains tough, that seems to impose on our bodies, on our sense of space, verticality, even sexuality, in ways that are difficult to fathom. Looking for its origins would seem to hold out the promise of answers, but don’t be too sure.
Donald Judd 1957–63: Paintings and Objects (eds. Eileen Costello, Sarah K. Rich and Lynn Zelevansky) is published by Gagosian/Rizzoli.
From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
