Donald Judd

Minimalist artist, born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, USA. He studied at the College of William and Mary, Columbia University, and at the Art Student's League. He had metal boxes manufactured to his specification, spray-painted one colour, and stood on the floor. He had therefore only ‘minimal’ contact with his work, which is deliberately non-imitative, non-expressive, and not ‘composed’ in any traditional sense. His first one-man show was held in New York City in 1964.

Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 - February 12, 1994) was a minimalist artist (a term he stridently disavowed) whose work sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. He served in the Army from 1946-1947 as an engineer and then began his studies in philosophy 1948 at the College of William and Mary, later transferring to Columbia University where he earned a degree in philosophy and worked towards a master's in art history under Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Shapiro. While at Columbia he attended night classes at the Arts Students League in New York City. He supported himself by writing art criticism for major American art magazines; In 1968 the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a retrospective of his work which included none of his early paintings.

In 1968 Judd bought a five-story building in New York that allowed him to start placing his work in a more permanent manner than was possible in gallery or museum shows. This would later lead him to push for permanent installations for his work and that of others, as he believed that temporary exhibitions, being designed by curators for the public, placed the art itself in the background, ultimately degrading it due to incompetency or incomprehension. This would become a major preoccupation as the idea of permanent installation grew in importance and his distaste for the art world grew in equal proportion. Judd believed that art should not represent anything, that it should unequivocally stand on its own and simply exist.

In the early seventies Judd started making annual trips to Baja California with his family. In 1971 he rented a house in Marfa, Texas as an antidote to the hectic New York art world.

In 1979, with help from the Dia Art Foundation, Judd purchased a 340 acre (1.4 km²) tract of desert land near Marfa, Texas which included the abandoned buildings of the former U.S. Army Fort D. The Chinati Foundation opened on the site in 1986 as a non-profit art foundation, dedicated to Judd and his contemporaries. The permanent collection consists of large-scale works by Judd, sculptor John Chamberlain, light-artist Dan Flavin and select others, including David Rabinowitch, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Carl Andre and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen. Judd's work in Marfa includes 15 outdoor works in concrete and 100 aluminum pieces housed in two painstakingly renovated artillery sheds.

In 2006, the Judd Foundation decided to auction off about 35 of his sculptures at Christie's in New York. The announced purpose of the sale was to build an endowment to support the permanent installation of Judd's works in Texas and New York. The $25 million in proceeds from the sale will enable the Foundation to fulfill its mission: in his will, Mr. Judd stated, such "works of art which I own at the time of my death as are installed at 101 Spring Street in New York City, or in Marfa, Tex., will be preserved where they are installed."