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Lot Essay
Created in 1967, the present work is a scintillating early example of Donald Judd’s ‘progression’ series. It has been included in significant institutional exhibitions at the Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe (1994), the Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense (1995), the Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2000) and the Menil Collection, Houston (2003). Wall-mounted and near-architectural in impact, the horizontal sculpture is notched into ten rectilinear sections. These volumes widen progressively in half-inch increments, while the nine voids between them follow the same sequence in reverse. For Judd, such serial formulas minimised subjective decision-making in the creative process. This work’s precise, seamless form and non-painterly colour—it is made of galvanised iron, which sparkles through an even coat of peacock-blue lacquer—likewise elide any trace of the artist’s hand. A fierce idealist, Judd sought to create what he called ‘specific objects’. Departing from the illusionistic, expressive traditions of sculpture and painting, these works were autonomous presences to be experienced in real space and time.
Judd created his first ‘progression’ work in wood in 1964. He began his collaboration with the Brooklyn sheet-metal factory Bernstein Brothers, who fabricated the present work, in the same year. The partnership allowed Judd to produce metal ‘progressions’ and other series in a range of colours and forms. He explored vivid automotive pigments and enamelled, galvanised and anodised coatings. Unadorned brass, steel and copper were equally valued for their inherent chromatic qualities. Like his use of modular sequences, these industrial materials furthered Judd’s decisive break with art-historical custom. They also shifted his art’s production from the studio to the world of modern manufacturing. Judd’s sensitivity to texture and colour, however, belies the view of cold rationality often associated with Minimalist art. ‘Giorgione’s and Titian’s deep blue and orange brown is vast and inescapable,’ he said (D. Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Colour in General and Red and Black in Particular’, Artforum, Summer 1994, p. 77).
Judd used a range of formulas to compose his ‘progressions’, variously involving doubling, division and addition. He did not employ these mathematical givens to make any statement about the nature of the world. Rather, they were structures that could be apprehended intuitively by the viewer in space. ‘You don’t walk up to it and understand how it is working,’ he said, ‘but I think you do understand that there is a scheme there … The progressions made it possible to use an asymmetrical arrangement, yet to have some sort of order involved in composition’ (D. Judd quoted in ‘Don Judd: An Interview with John Coplans’, Donald Judd, exh. cat. Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena 1971, p. 40). The present sculpture exemplifies the compelling presence—free of narrative or reference—that Judd could achieve in his language of material, space and colour.
Judd created his first ‘progression’ work in wood in 1964. He began his collaboration with the Brooklyn sheet-metal factory Bernstein Brothers, who fabricated the present work, in the same year. The partnership allowed Judd to produce metal ‘progressions’ and other series in a range of colours and forms. He explored vivid automotive pigments and enamelled, galvanised and anodised coatings. Unadorned brass, steel and copper were equally valued for their inherent chromatic qualities. Like his use of modular sequences, these industrial materials furthered Judd’s decisive break with art-historical custom. They also shifted his art’s production from the studio to the world of modern manufacturing. Judd’s sensitivity to texture and colour, however, belies the view of cold rationality often associated with Minimalist art. ‘Giorgione’s and Titian’s deep blue and orange brown is vast and inescapable,’ he said (D. Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Colour in General and Red and Black in Particular’, Artforum, Summer 1994, p. 77).
Judd used a range of formulas to compose his ‘progressions’, variously involving doubling, division and addition. He did not employ these mathematical givens to make any statement about the nature of the world. Rather, they were structures that could be apprehended intuitively by the viewer in space. ‘You don’t walk up to it and understand how it is working,’ he said, ‘but I think you do understand that there is a scheme there … The progressions made it possible to use an asymmetrical arrangement, yet to have some sort of order involved in composition’ (D. Judd quoted in ‘Don Judd: An Interview with John Coplans’, Donald Judd, exh. cat. Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena 1971, p. 40). The present sculpture exemplifies the compelling presence—free of narrative or reference—that Judd could achieve in his language of material, space and colour.