The very first example of Donald Judd’s large-scale “bullnose” wall progressions, untitled (DSS 70) was created during a pivotal moment in the artist’s career-long investigation of positive and negative space. Coalescing the industrial material of galvanized iron with a scintillating, elegant surface, these “progressions”—in which each projection becomes longer and the space between them shrinks—would become one of Judd’s most well-known forms and revolutionized Minimalism and post-war art history. 

"[Red] has the right value for a three-dimensional object. If you paint something black or any dark color, you can’t tell what its edges are like. Red seems to be the only color that really makes an object sharp and defines its contours and angles." 
— Donald Judduntitled specifically represents the culmination of the artist’s development of the iconic “bullnose” progression, building on the form of a wood prototype from a year prior and a smaller galvanized iron example earlier in 1965. Executed in 1965, this piece of history was first part of Leo Castelli’s own collection, and has been owned by the same important private collector for almost three decades.

The Bullnose

Although Judd began his career as a painter, he struggled to cleanse his art from the customs which he considered the grime of art history: composition, illusion, anthropomorphism, oil paint, the flat canvas. After some initial experiments with sculpture in 1961 and 1962, Judd began searching for a unique form that would encapsulate his radical philosophy about the nature of space and art—which came to him in 1964 in the shape of his first wall progression. Composed of red lacquer on wood, untitled (DSS 45) was executed in what would become known as his “bullnose” style, and though not entirely representative of Judd’s mechanical trajectory, it showed hints of his signature approach. It was at this point that the artist abandoned painting altogether, shifting his focus entirely to three-dimensionality and sculpture, the medium that would preoccupy him for the rest of his oeuvre. “Because the nature of three dimensions isn’t set, given beforehand,” the artist wrote, “something credible can be made, almost anything.”ⁱ

The artist translated this prototype into galvanized iron for one example of untitled (DSS 67), a small form only 25 ½ inches long, the following year, on June 22, 1965. Judd did not immediately sell or exhibit DSS 67, and likely was actively referring to it exactly five months later, when on November 22, 1965, Judd returned to this form and executed his first large-scale bullnose—the present work. 

"Because the nature of three dimensions isn’t set, given beforehand, something credible can be made, almost anything."
— Donald Judd

Finally able to articulate his breakthrough form in a fuller size—over double the width of the prototype and DSS 67—it would be this exact example that he would select to include in several exhibitions over the next couple years as representative of the inroads he was making in sculpture: the seminal 7 Sculptors at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1965-1966; Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Structure, Finch College Museum of Art, New York in 1966; Sculpture: New York Scene, Riverside Museum, New York in 1967; and a group exhibition at Bykert Gallery in 1967. Other examples from this form were shown in Judd’s most important museum exhibitions of the 1960s—the one now house in The Museum Ulm (example 3) was included in his landmark 1968 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Saint Louis Art Museum’s (example 5) was in the artist’s 1971 Pasadena Art Museum exhibition.

Indexing this specific structure and progression, “bullnose” is reference to a specific type of chisel with a rounded head—an analogy to a practical tool that no doubt appealed to Judd’s predilection for industrial machinery. Even the sizes of the projections follow a precise mathematical order, increasing arithmetically by one-and-a-half inches with the spaces between them matching the protrusions in the reverse order–the same formula he used in all of his works of this form. The artist went on to produce numerous other bullnoses well into the 1970s, and it would become one of his most iconic forms; this style of progressions can be found in myriad colors, materials, and sizes in museums around the world.

The Power of Red

A master at wielding color so efficiently in a regard only rivaled by Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian, Judd executed the present work in red lacquer. One of his favorite shades, he often employed red because he considered the color to be without reference to figuration. He also appreciated its ability to articulate every detail of the object it defined, which he understood to be a quality unique to red: “[Red] has the right value for a three-dimensional object. If you paint something black or any dark color, you can’t tell what its edges are like. Red seems to be the only color that really makes an object sharp and defines its contours and angles.”ⁱⁱ 

Embracing the Industrial

As his practice evolved, Judd increasingly sought out industrial materials for their pliability and anonymity—the very antithesis of the glorification of the artist’s hand perpetuated by Abstract Expressionists. In 1964, he first commissioned The Bernstein Brothers, a metal-working shop in New York, to cover his sculptures in galvanized iron, as exemplified in the present work. Unlike other metals, galvanized iron has an almost painterly quality due to its raw, marbled surface, yet – crucially for Judd’s purposes – its metal structure prevents the viewer from approaching the work with prefixed artistic connotations. The clarity and simplicity of industrial material is characteristic to Judd’s emphasis on object itself as art—he believed the truth of art to be free from Western pictorial illusionism. Thus, he wanted his objects to be heterogeneous enough to express a unity indifferent to custom or tradition, yet indicative of a larger truth about human experience and phenomenology.

Despite its clarity and precision, untitled prompts perceptual questions concerning its arrangement and composition. At first glance, the object’s smooth metal surface makes it appear to be a solid, bar-like construction incapable of hovering against a wall, but closer investigation reveals it to be hollow and light. As David Raskin elucidated, “Art like Judd’s successfully exposed the drawback of trusting sensations to provide understanding, since it proved that there could never be direct sensory access to reality, which instead waited to be discovered by other analytical means.”^iv 

A Sense of Order

"The sense of objects occurs with forms that are near some simple, basic, profound forms you feel. These disappear when you try to make them into imaginable visual or tactile forms. The reference to objects gives them a way to occur." 
— Donald Judd

This proportional complexity becomes evident in the mathematical spacing of ten units in untitled, which is dominated by semicircular contours protruding out of a rectilinear prism. The mathematical formula that orders the work creates an emotionally and intellectually satisfying sense of unity; like seeing a golden mean in nature, the arithmetic in Judd’s sculpture constitutes a philosophical statement on how and why we find art beautiful in the first place. Yet this apparent assertion of pragmatism and order creates further visual puzzles, since the divergence in spacing means that it is rarely possible to predict the appearance of the whole work from any given side viewpoint of the sculpture. These optical illusions prove that “reality” is always filtered through the senses, that “meaning… is unintelligible apart from … the semiological conventions of the public space.”^v Balancing an uncompromising material honesty with a maddening ambiguity, untitled represents the absolute vanguard of radical post-war sculpture.

ⁱ Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” 1965 in Donald Judd: The Complete Writings, 1959-1975, New York, 2015, p. 184.
ⁱⁱ Donald Judd, "Don Judd: An Interview with John Coplans," in Don Judd, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum, 1971, p. 25.
ⁱⁱⁱ Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” 1993, in ed. Dietmar Elger, Donald Judd: Colorist, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum Hannover, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, pp. 110-114.
^iv David Raskin, “Judd’s Moral Art,” Donald Judd, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2004, p. 80.
^v Rosalind Kraus, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post ‘60s Sculpture,” Artforum, vol. 12, no. 3, November 1973, p. 47.