The Sculpture of Donald Judd

Critical interpretation meets personal essay in this groundbreaking assessment of Donald Judd’s sculptural work

The Sculpture of Donald Judd is the first chronological study of the artist’s pathbreaking and enormously influential work beginning with his turn from painting to sculpture in 1961–62 until his death in 1994. The analyses of the work, often considered the foundation of Minimalism, are based on close readings, highly attentive to detail and informed by a friendship with the artist. Despite Judd’s refusal to call his work sculpture, this examination deliberately situates it within the history of the medium as a way both to explain its originality and to reveal the evolution of its spatial inventions from a closed, object-oriented model to an open, often polychrome pictorialism.

With its personal insights into the artist’s thinking, its attention to the logic of the work’s development, and its more than 150 illustrations, almost all in color, The Sculpture of Donald Judd provides a provocative, eye-opening account by an esteemed art historian that challenges the conventional view, mostly based on the artist’s own writings, of Judd’s celebrated body of work.