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Lot Essay
Rendered in the artist's signature cadmium red light anodized aluminum and glowing reflecting brass, Untitled (78-4 Treitel-Gratz), defines the primary visual language of Donald Judd's achievement. Conflating rigorous geometric design and an a priori determined mathematical system, Untitled nevertheless conveys the artist's commitment to spectacular coloration, which inheres in the medium insistently, its optical force deriving from the sheer brilliance of refracting chroma. Having famously sought to abandon any evidence of the authorial hand, Judd nevertheless has created a compelling visual object in its own terms. A statement of assertive materiality and conceptual rigor, Untitled evinces a chromatic resonance in its lustrous surfaces and embedded coloration. Animating an expanse of six feet, its repeating, yet varied modules elicit an emphatic rhythmic thrust that compels as it fascinates. Based on the seemingly simple formula of doubling, Untitled plays with a series of volumetric projections and voids: as the positive surfaces increase, so the negative spaces decrease, creating dynamically shifting relationships among parts. The sense of a graspable whole is effected by a strong horizontal band of brass, which fixes the individual units and creates a totalizing sense of controlled spaces. Judd's insistence on engaging the viewer in a survey of materials, shapes, and generative schemes is enhanced here by this series of punctuations created not only by the repetition of gradated boxes, but also color. This polarization of elements--predetermined systematic ordering against sensuous coloration--is a key thematic of Judd's oeuvre, splendidly evident in the present work.
The importance of the present work lies not only in its being the point of departure for Judd's avant-gardism, his substitution of objectivism for illusionism, but also in its being a seminal example of Judd's commitment to the use of industrial materials and their coloration. The combination of metals that in and of themselves glow with inhering hues and those that radiate with synthetic coloration, brings to the fore Judd's investment in chroma per se and his agenda to turn painterly illusionism against itself: to create out of color and materiality a flat, planar objectivism. Cadmium red light (light rather than medium or dark, both values, in Judd's assessment, which muddied the clarity of form for which he strove), is the color Judd chose for much of his early work, whether wall reliefs or floor pieces, a color that for him accomplished most convincingly his agenda of defining space. "I like [red] and I like the quality of cadmium red light...If you paint something black or any dark color, you can't tell what its edges are like. If you paint it white, it seems small and purist. And red, other than a gray of that value, seems to be the only color that really makes a an object sharp and defines its contours and angles" (J. Coplans, 'An Interview with Don Judd,' Artforum 9:10, June 1971, p. 43).
In creating form out of this ration of 1:2, Judd was able to eradicate what he considered physical enactments of psychic phenomena, the personal gesture as a trace of an artist's presence. For Judd, the artwork must eschew the over used signs of personal authorship to focus on the perceptual clarity of form, where the facts of material construction are transparent. Striking in the tensile strength of its self-sufficiency and chromatic shimmer, Untitled exemplifies what is most basic to Judd serial geometric forms: "that things should be independent, comprehensible, and obvious; [this] is an intensely important idea for him because he knows, as his work reveals, that at that point, they begin to get really complicated" (R. Smith, Donald Judd: A Catalogue of the Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1975, p. 31).
The importance of the present work lies not only in its being the point of departure for Judd's avant-gardism, his substitution of objectivism for illusionism, but also in its being a seminal example of Judd's commitment to the use of industrial materials and their coloration. The combination of metals that in and of themselves glow with inhering hues and those that radiate with synthetic coloration, brings to the fore Judd's investment in chroma per se and his agenda to turn painterly illusionism against itself: to create out of color and materiality a flat, planar objectivism. Cadmium red light (light rather than medium or dark, both values, in Judd's assessment, which muddied the clarity of form for which he strove), is the color Judd chose for much of his early work, whether wall reliefs or floor pieces, a color that for him accomplished most convincingly his agenda of defining space. "I like [red] and I like the quality of cadmium red light...If you paint something black or any dark color, you can't tell what its edges are like. If you paint it white, it seems small and purist. And red, other than a gray of that value, seems to be the only color that really makes a an object sharp and defines its contours and angles" (J. Coplans, 'An Interview with Don Judd,' Artforum 9:10, June 1971, p. 43).
In creating form out of this ration of 1:2, Judd was able to eradicate what he considered physical enactments of psychic phenomena, the personal gesture as a trace of an artist's presence. For Judd, the artwork must eschew the over used signs of personal authorship to focus on the perceptual clarity of form, where the facts of material construction are transparent. Striking in the tensile strength of its self-sufficiency and chromatic shimmer, Untitled exemplifies what is most basic to Judd serial geometric forms: "that things should be independent, comprehensible, and obvious; [this] is an intensely important idea for him because he knows, as his work reveals, that at that point, they begin to get really complicated" (R. Smith, Donald Judd: A Catalogue of the Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1975, p. 31).