Ray County, Missouri Obituaries - Donald Judd (1928 - 1994) Donald Judd, 65, Painter, Sculptor and Designer By ROBERTA SMITH Published: February 14, 1994 New York Times Donald Judd, one of the foremost American postwar artists and a major figure in the Minimalist art movement, died on Saturday at New York Hospital in Manhattan. He was 65 and had homes in Manhattan; Marfa, Tex., and Kussnacht am Rigi, Switzerland. The cause was lymphoma, said his son, Flavin. A taciturn, sometimes prickly man who was generous to those who knew him, Mr. Judd was an artist of extreme self-confidence who exercised his formidable intelligence on many fronts. In the late 1950's and early '60s, his terse reviews in Arts magazine established him as a rigorous advocate of new art, well known for arguing that painting was, in his words, "finished." By the late '60s, his sleek cubic and rectilinear works had helped redefine the direction of postwar sculpture, eliminating pedestals and stressing open, somewhat weightless volumes characterized by lush metals and translucent or opaque plexiglass. His art insisted that explorations of space, scale and materials could be ends in themselves. Reached by telephone Saturday, Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in America, said: "He is one of the crucial figures of the '60s generation. It is impossible to think of American art of that period without him." 'Something You Look At' Mr. Judd disliked the word Minimalist, calling himself "an empiricist" when pressed, and refused to call his work sculpture because he thought that implied carving. Like the efforts of other Minimalists, including Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Carl Andre and Robert Morris, his simple, factory-made forms were seen as "radically depersonalized" (in the words of one critic, Hilton Kramer), devoid of emotion and signaling a dead end for art. Much was made of the fact that Mr. Judd's work was fabricated by others and that mathematical progressions sometimes determined his compositions. One of his most famous, and most misconstrued, pronouncements was "Art need only be interesting." Despite such deadpan statements, Mr. Judd's art descended from a line of visionary abstractionists that included Mondrian, Malevich and Barnett Newman. Critics both pro and con frequently remarked on the moral integrity of his work, as well as the beauty of his unadorned surfaces, calling him an "exquisite Minimalist" (Robert Hughes) and a "closet hedonist" (Mr. Kramer). While both his art and his thinking were often seen as having directly influenced Conceptual art, Mr. Judd declined to take credit, maintaining that "art is something you look at." Once he found his mature style, Mr. Judd pursued his reduced vocabulary with a conviction that few other Minimalists matched. He was a master of scale and detail, for whom the thickness of a sheet of metal or the placement of screws were of paramount importance. He could cover an enormous wall with a grid of slanting plywood planes that measured space in simple, forceful rhythms, or set the interior of a copper-sided box aglow with a bottom plane of red-painted steel. In his later years, he also designed furniture whose simplicity echoed his own sculptures and the work of early modernist designers he admired, like Gerrit Rietveld. And he tried his hand at architecture, renovating and expanding in often striking ways several buildings that he owned in and around Marfa, including the barracks, hangars and gymnasium on a former Army post and the structures on a 45,000-acre ranch overlooking the Rio Grande. At his death, he was working on designs for a fountain in Winterthur, Switzerland, and a new facade for a railroad station in Basel, Switzerland. He was known for turning his various domiciles into subtle gesamtkunstwerks in which art, furniture and quantities of open space created a spare, stylish look. He applied his stringent visual standards to everything around him, not only his collection of art and furniture, but also objects of everyday use. More than one visitor to Mr. Judd's cast-iron building in SoHo recalled being offered single-malt Scotch in a Baccarat glass that so generous in scale it was heavy to the hand. Disdainful of anthropomorphism, he said he admired Scottish bagpipe music because it was the only music that did not remind him of conversations. He was also known for being intractable and litigious where his work was concerned. In the late 1980's, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum acquired works attributed to Mr. Judd and plans for the construction of his works from the Italian collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the artist renounced the pieces and criticized the museum. In 1985, when he felt that the Dia Art Foundation had reneged on a promise to finance permanent exhibition spaces for his and other artists' work on the Army post in Marfa, he threatened to sue the foundation. Dia and Mr. Judd created the Chinati Foundation, which took possession of the artworks and buildings on the post. At Chinati, Mr. Judd created permanent installations of contemporary art that are among the largest and most beautiful in the world. The Life of an Object Donald Clarence Judd was born on June 3, 1928, in his grandparents' farmhouse in Excelsior Springs, Mo., and showed an aptitude for art from an early age. His father was a Western Union executive, and the family moved frequently, a condition that he later said contributed to his shyness. After serving in the Army in the Korean War, he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Columbia and studied painting at the Art Students League. In the late 1950's he returned to Columbia to study art history. Throughout the 1950's, Mr. Judd worked, with increasing dissatisfaction, in painting, trying to build on the innovative scale and strong colors of the Abstract Expressionists. But his deliberate, somewhat undemonstrative temperament was unsuited for an art of improvisation, and his images became simpler and more geometric. Already convinced that representational art was a thing of the past, he became increasingly sure that even abstract art could not presume to describe human emotion. Instead, he began to believe in the autonomy of the art object, namely that the object's purpose was not to serve as a metaphor for human life, but to have a strong formal life of its own, something he frequently called specificity. "A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself," he wrote in 1964. "It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole." Blunt, judgmental and drily humorous, Mr. Judd's writing helped identify a new generation of artists and lift the New York art world out of the doldrums of second-generation Abstract Expressionism and away from what he saw as tired European esthetic conventions. He championed John Chamberlain's crushed-car sculptures, Claes Oldenburg's Pop Art sculptures, Lee Bontecou's menacing canvas reliefs and Frank Stella's slablike stripe paintings. By 1962 he was making freestanding objects, quirkily aggressive boxes, ramps and open structures, many of them painted his favorite color, cadmium red light. These pieces, seen in his 1963 exhibition at the Green Gallery, gave him an artistic reputation to match his critical one. In 1966 he joined the Leo Castelli Gallery; he was later represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery and then the Pace Gallery. In 1968 the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a survey of his work, the first of many exhibitions at major museums in this country and abroad. Mr. Judd's marriage to Julie Finch, a dancer, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in Manhattan and Marfa, he is survived by his mother, Effie, of Excelsior Springs; his daughter, Rainer, of Los Angeles and Marfa, and his companion, Marianne Stockebrand. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by County Coordinator