Executed in 1987, Untitled is an archetypal piece from Judd’s mature practice. Spanning over a meter in length, this wall-mounted work is formed from a series of interconnected rectangular and box-like units, painted in shades of pure white, black, red, and grey. Beginning five years earlier in 1983, Judd began creating aluminium wall pieces wherein he succeeded in integrating colour into his work with greater variety and complexity than ever before. Eschewing the illusory realm often evoked through the use of traditional artist’s tools, such as oil paint, canvas, marble, and bronze, Judd’s oeuvre champions industrial materials. From steel to concrete, plexiglass to aluminium, Judd inventively explored the physical, tangible space around him in ways that sharply departed from the traditions of art history.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/DACS, London 2022
Judd’s practice explores the problems of coloured objects in space. His late works, of which the present work is a prime example, were essential in helping to initiate critical debate regarding use of colour. For these aluminium wall pieces, Judd composed structures out of boxes in three different formats—30, 60, and 120 cent.mes tres. The earlier works of this series put together complex, strongly contrasting colour arrangements, generally in multiples of two. However, Judd was careful to distribute the colours so that no adjacent boxes shared the same shade. By the late 1980s, Judd’s palette had shrunk to allow him to concentrate on a smaller number of colours which allowed these to extend across a number of elements screwed together. The present work keenly exemplifies this evolving aspect of the series. As his selection of colours became increasingly neutral, Judd cautiously avoided art-historical forebearers, references to his own earlier work, or combinations of colours that may have suggested symbolic meaning.
In the sheet-aluminum works I wanted to use more and diverse bright colors than before. As I will describe later, there are many combinations, some old as I listed, and some my own from earlier work. I wanted to avoid both of these. I especially didn’t want the combinations to be harmonious, an old and implicative idea, which is the easiest to avoid, or to be inharmonious in reaction, which is harder to avoid. I wanted all of the colors to be present at once. I didn’t want them to combine. I wanted a multiplicity all at once that I had not known before. This was very difficult.
In the same year that the present work was created, Dan Flavin — the American minimalist artist renowned for his sculptural objects and installations composed of commercially available fluorescent light fixtures — created the work Untitled (to Don Judd, colorist). Flavin’s fluorescent sculpture keenly highlighted the principle importance of colour in Judd’s work. Within the context of minimalism, colour was often critically reduced to means of distinguishing different elements of a work from one another, and colour variations merely led to variant forms of the composite object. Beyond this purpose, colour was stripped of its status as aesthetic phenomenon. For Judd however, who in his writing and interviews repeatedly claimed his place outside of the minimalist canon, the use of colour takes on a much greater role than simple visual variation. In his seminal essay ‘Some Aspects of Colour in General and Red and Black in Particular’, Judd begins with the assertion of his abiding belief in the importance of colour: “Material, space and color are the main aspects of visual art”( Donald Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’ in Exh. Cat. Hanover, Sprengel Museum Hanover; Bregenz, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Donald Judd Colorist, 1993, p. 79). Judd supported his argument with well-founded theoretical arguments, having made a detailed study of the use of colour by artists ranging from Rogier van der Weyden, Titian and Henri Matisse to his contemporaries Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, whose work he much admired. Even during his t.mes studying art history and philosophy at Columbia University in New York, Judd became more than familiar with the influential colour theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and M. E. Chevreul, but also with those of Adolf Hoelzel, Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Albers.
The openness that Judd always required of his art, both in form and meaning, has its roots in the underlying morals of the artist. In the sense that these objects cannot be deployed as instruments of some kind nor as containers in which to conceal, the very openness of form which his objects demonstrate may be interpreted as a form of honesty. Reading their structures as potential models, comprised by components of equal compositional status and structural significance, Untitled from 1987 exemplifies the monumental status of Judd’s revolutionary oeuvre.