Donald Judd’s view of the inheritance of Modernism

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Part of an essay question I have is: Give a critical appraisal of Judd’s view of the inheritance of Modernism. How valid were Judd’s objections to painting and sculpture?

In relation to this article: 'Specific Objects', excerpts from Harrison & Wood, pp. 824-8. However I'm just not getting my head around it. Can anyone provide any enlightenment or advice to answering these questions in relation to this article?

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'Specific Objects' by Donald Judd.

Judd’s first one-man show was held at the Green Gallery in New York in 1964 after he had abandoned painting for work which took the form of reliefs and free-standing objects. This essay was first published the following year. It is noteworthy for its claim that the represen¬tative art of the modern is now neither painting nor sculpture but the virtual new medium of 'three-dimensional work'.

On the question of the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, Judd thus stakes out his position in clear opposition to Greenberg's (as exemplified in VIB8). As a consequence of the forthrightness of his views and the consistently spare style of his work, Judd was identified as a leading figure in the form of apostate (One who has abandoned one's religious faith, a political party, one's principles, or a cause) Modernism which came to be called Minimalism.

This is an identification which Judd himself resisted, however. Despite the concentration of his own sculptural output on a quite restricted range of box-like forms, it is noteworthy that in this early formulation his conception of 'three-dimensional ' is exemplified ( To illustrate by example ) by reference to a thoroughly heterogeneous (consisting of dissimilar elements or parts) range of examples. First published in Arts Yearbook, 8, New York, 1965, pp. 74-82; reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1975, from which the present text is taken.


Continued in next post...

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Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it as has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common.

The new three-dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities. The similarities are selected from the work; they aren't a movement's first principles or delimiting rules.

Three-dimensionality is not as near being simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to that. But now painting and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more defined, not undeniable and unavoidable. They are particular forms circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualifies. Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative. It opens to anything.

Many of the reasons for this use are negative, points against painting and sculpture, and since both are common sources, the negative reasons are those nearest common-age. 'The motive to change is always some uneasiness: nothing setting us upon the change Of State, or upon any new action, but some uneasiness.' The positive reasons are more particular. Another reason for listing the insufficiencies of painting and sculp¬ture first is that both are familiar and their elements and qualifies more easily located.


The objections to painting and sculpture are going to sound more intolerant than they are. There are qualifications. The disinterest in painting and sculpture is a disinterest in doing it again, not in it as it is being done by those who developed the last advanced versions. New work always involves objections to the old, but these objections are really relevant only to the new. They are part of it. If the earlier work is first-rate it is complete. New inconsistencies and limitations aren't retroactive (influencing or applying to a period prior to enactment); they concern only work that is being developed.

Obviously, three-dimensional work will not cleanly succeed painting and sculpture. It's not like a movement: anyway, movements no longer work: also, linear history has unraveled somewhat. The new work exceeds painting in plain power, but power isn’t the only consideration, though the difference between it and expression can't be too great either. There are other ways than power and form in which one kind of art can be more or less than another.

Finally, a flat and rectangular surface is too handy to give up. Some things can be done only on a flat surface. Lichtenstein's representation of a representation is a good instance. But this work which is neither painting nor sculpture challenges both. It will have to be taken into account by new artists. It will probably change painting and sculpture.

The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it.

In work before 1946 the edges of the rectangular are a boundary, the end of the picture. The composition must react to the edges and the rectangle must be unified, but the shape of the rectangle is not stressed; the parts are more important, and the relationships of color and form occur among them. In the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman, and more recently of Reinhardt and Noland, the rectangle is emphasized.

The elements inside the rectangle are broad and simple and correspond closely to the rectangle. The shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane.

The parts are few and so subordinate to the unity as not to be parts in an ordinary sense. A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. The one thing overpowers the earlier painting. It also establishes the rectangle as a definite form: it is no longer a fairly neutral limit. A form can be used only in so many ways. The rectangular plane is given a life span. The simplicity required to emphasize the rectangle limits the arrangements possible within it.

The sense of singleness also has a duration, but it is only beginning and has a better future outside of painting. Its occurrence in painting now looks like a beginning, in which new forms are often made from earlier schemes and materials.

The plane is also emphasized and nearly single. It is clearly a plane one or two inches in front of another plane, the wall, and parallel to it. The relationship of the two planes is specific; it is a form. Everything on or slightly in the plane of the painting must be arranged laterally.

Almost all paintings are spatial(Of, relating to, involving, or having the nature of space.) in one way or another. Yves Klein's blue paintings are the only ones that are unspatial, and there is little that is nearly unspatial, mainly Stella’s work. It's possible that not much can be done with both an upright rectangular plane and an absence of space. Anything on a surface has space behind it. Two colors on same surface almost always lie on different depths. An even colour, especially in paint, covering all or much of a painting is almost always both flat and infinitely spatial.

The space is shallow in all of the work in which the rectangular plane is stressed. Rothko's space is shallow and the soft rectangles are parallel to the plane but the space is almost traditionally illusionistic.

In Reinhardt's paintings, just back from the plane of the canvas, there is a flat plane and this seems in turn indefinitely} deep. Pollock's paint is obviously on the canvas, and the space is mainly that made by any marks on a surface, so that it is not very descriptive and illusionistic.

Noland’s concentric bands are not as specifically paint-on-a-surface as Pollock's paint, but the bands flatten the literal space more. As flat and unillusionistic as Noland's paintings are, the bands do advance and recede. Even a single circle will warp the surface to it, will have a little space behind it.

Except for a complete and unvaried field of color or marks, anything spaced in a rectangle and on a plane suggests something in and on something else, something in its surround, which suggests an object or figure in its space, in which these are clearer instances of a similar world - that's the main purpose of painting.

The recent paintings aren't completely single. There are a few dominant areas, Rothko's rectangles or Noland's circles, and there is the area around them. There is a gap between the main forms the most expressive parts, and rest of the canvas, the plane and the rectangle.

The central forms still occur in a wider and indefinite context, although the singleness of the paintings abridges (To reduce the length of) the general and solipsistic (The theory or view that the self is the only reality) quality of earlier work. Fields are also usually not limited, and they give the appearance of sections cut from something indefinitely larger.



Oil paint; and canvas aren’t as strong as commercial paints and as the colours and surfaces of materials, especially if the materials are used in three dimensions. Oil and canvas are familiar and, like the rectangular plane, have a certain quality and have limits. The quality is especially identified with art.

The new work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer to painting: Most sculpture is like the painting which preceded Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman.

The newest thing about it is its broad scale. Its' materials are somewhat more emphasized than before. The imagery involves a couple of salient(Projecting or jutting beyond a line or surface; protruding) resemblances to other visible things and a number of more oblique references, every¬thing generalized to compatibility. The parts and the space are allusive, descriptive and somewhat naturalistic. [...]

Most sculpture is made part by part, by addition, composed. The main parts remain fairly discrete. They and the small parts are a collection of variations, slight through great. There are hierarchies of clarity and strength and of proximity to one or two main ideas. Wood and metal are the usual materials, either alone or together, and if together it is without much of a contrast. There is seldom any color. The middling contrast and the natural monochrome are general and help to unity the parts.

There is little of any of this in the new three-dimensional work. So far the most obvious difference within this diverse work is between that which is something of an object, a single thing, and that which is open and extended, more or less environmental.

There isn't as great a difference in their nature as in their appearance, though. Old¬enburg and others have done both. There are precedents of some of the characteristics of the new work. The parts are usually subordinate and not separate in Arp's sculpture and often in Brancusi's.

Duchamp's ready-mades and other Dada objects are also seen at once and not part by part. Cornell's boxes have too many parts to seem at first to be structured. Part-by-part structure can't be too simple or too complicated. It has to seem orderly. The degree of Arp's abstraction, the moderate extent of his reference to the human body, neither imitative nor very oblique, is unlike the imagery of most of it.

The work of Johns and Rauschenberg and assemblage and low-relief generally, Orman’s relief for example, are preliminaries. Johns few cast objects and a few of Rauschenberg’s work such as a goat with the tire, are beginnings.

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Stella's shaped paintings involve several important characteristics of three-dimensional work. The periphery(A line that forms the boundary of an area; a perimeter) of a piece and the lines inside correspond. The stripes are nowhere near being discrete parts. The surface is farther from the wall than usual, though it remains parallel to it. Since the surface is exceptionally unified and involves little or no space, the parallel plane is unusually distinct. The order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another. A painting isn't an image. The shapes; the unity, projection, order and colour are specific, aggressive and powerful.

Painting and sculpture have become set forms. A fair amount of their meaning isn't credible. The use of three dimensions isn't the use of a given form. There hasn't been enough time and work to see limits. So far, considered most widely, three dimensions are mostly a space to move into. The characteristics of three dimensions are those of only a small amount of work, little compared to painting and sculpture.

A few of the more general aspects may persist, such as the work's being like an object or being specific, but other characteristics are bound to develop. Since its range is so wide, three-dimensional work will probably divide into a number of forms. At any rate, it will be larger' than painting and much larger than sculpture, which, compared to painting, is fairly particular, much nearer to what is usually called a form, having a certain kind of form.

Because the nature of three dimensions isn't set, given beforehand, something credible can be made, almost anything. Of course something can be done within a given form, such as painting, but with some narrowness and less strength and variation. Since sculpture isn't so general a form, it can probably be only what it is now - which means that if it changes a great deal it will be something else; so it is finished.


Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colours - which is riddance of one of the salient (Strikingly conspicuous; prominent.) and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically (Of or relating to the essential nature of a thing;)more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all. Any material can be used, as is or painted.

A work needs only to be interesting. Most works finally have one quality. In earlier art the complexity was displayed and built the quality. In recent painting the complexity was the format and the few main shapes, which had been made according to various interests and problems.

A painting by Newman is finally no simpler than one by Cezanne. In the three-dimensional work the whole thing is made according to complex purposes, and these are not scattered but asserted by one form. It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyse or by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.

The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful. They are not diluted by an inherited format, variations of a form, mild contrasts and connecting parts and areas. European art had to represent a space and its contents as well as have sufficient unity and aesthetic interest.

Abstract painting before 1946 and most subse¬quent painting kept the representational subordination of the whole to its parts. Sculpture still does. In the new work the shape, image, colour and surface are single and not partial and scattered. There aren't any neutral or moderate areas or parts, any connections or traditional areas. The difference between the new work and earlier painting and present sculpture is like that between one of Brunelleschi's windows in the Badia di Fiesole and the facade of the Palazzo Rucellai, which is only an undeveloped rectangle as a whole and is mainly a collection of highly ordered parts. [...]
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