Donald Judd: 1957-1963: Paintings and Objects

This is the most comprehensive exploration of Donald Judd’s paintings and early works to date, providing unparalleled insight into the pivotal seven-year period in which the revered artist transitioned from two to three dimensions.

Donald Judd’s radical work and thinking helped shape the look of the late twentieth century and continue to influence artists, architects, and designers worldwide. He exercised a transformative influence over the ways in which both art objects and practical designs are produced, exhibited, encountered, and used.

While primarily known for his three-dimensional sculptural work, most notably his famed ＂stacks＂ and ＂progressions＂ series, Judd began life as a painter. Between 1957 and 1963 he produced around eighty works on canvas: distinctive explorations of line, color, and non-representational composition that would directly inform the iconic three-dimensional objects that followed.

This fully illustrated volume is the most comprehensive exploration of Judd’s painting and early works to date, providing unparalleled insight into that pivotal seven-year period, and tracing his transition from two to three dimensions. The book features newly commissioned photography of all of Judd’s paintings, in addition to his early experiments with wall-based sculptures, as well as extended essays from three leading art historians.

Eileen Costello, historian of modern and contemporary art, discusses Judd’s eventual rejection of, or transition from, the canvas in favor of the sculptural form. Sarah K. Rich, an associate professor of art history at PennState, Pennsylvania, and director of its Center for Virtual/Material Studies, deconstructs and analyzes Judd’s painterly technique and the resulting works on canvas. Lynn Zelevansky, historian, curator, and former Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, provides an overview of the period and the peers alongside whom Judd was formulating his paintings and early works.

Donald Judd was born in 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and died in 1994 in New York. His work is held in numerous collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. The Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Judd’s work in 2020-21. In 1986, Judd founded the Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati in Marfa, Texas, for the permanent installation of his large-scale works. In 1977, he established the Judd Foundation in New York and Marfa, Texas.

Eileen Costello is a historian of modern and contemporary art. A specialist in catalogue raisonné scholarship, she is the editor and project director of Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing (The Menil Collection, 2018), is nearing completion of the catalogue raisonné of Tony Smith’s architecture, and is editing the catalogue raisonné of Arshile Gorky’s complete works.

Sarah K. Rich is an associate professor of art history at PennState, Pennsylvania, and director of its Center for Virtual/Material Studies.

Lynn Zelevansky is an art historian, curator, and writer based in New York. From 2009 through 2017, she was the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. From 1995 to 2009, she held several positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ending her tenure as Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art. From 1986 to 1995, she worked as a curatorial assistant in the Painting and Sculpture Department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.