“It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.”
—Donald Judd

With Untitled, 1976, Donald Judd presents a pristine expanse of stainless steel in a bull-nosed, cantilever form, mounted to the wall and curved with a perfect, rounded front edge. The surface of the work is smooth and unmarked, save a single, industrial seam that bisects Untitled down the center. The work is monumental in scale—six feet across, it projects almost two feet off the wall—and yet its polished and reflective surface produces a light, weightless quality that seems to defy the object’s physical volume. Untitled is a powerful expression of Judd’s signature aesthetic and intellectual rigor at the height of his career.

 

 

The unadorned metal surface and breathtakingly austere form of Untitled are instantly recognizable as hallmarks of Judd’s minimalist idiom. Though the artist did not like the term “Minimalist”—he preferred to call himself an “empiricist”—the influence his work had on Minimalism, as a wider art movement, cannot be overstated. Disinterested in the emotional heights of Abstract Expressionism, and uninspired by the prospect of representational painting, Judd felt that painting and sculpture had become “set forms,” which the artist found creatively stifling. As articulated in his landmark 1965 essay, “Specific Objects,” Judd defined an artwork as something that was interesting in its specificity and its inherent value as an object, unlimited by an arbitrary term like “sculpture.”ⁱ For Judd, interesting, “specific objects” were radically minimalist objects, like Untitled, that pushed abstraction to its geometric extreme.

 

 

Given the cerebral nature of his personal art philosophy, it follows that, for Judd, the idea of an artwork was more important than his manual involvement in the process of production. With works like Untitled, Judd sought to eliminate the artist’s hand as much as possible, which led him to begin working with industrial fabricators in the mid-1960s, including the Bernstein Brothers, who fabricated the present work.ⁱⁱ This dual part artistic process—a period of ideation, followed by one of fabrication—aligns with what art historian James Meyer identifies as the core value of “progression” in Judd’s work. His oeuvre is a modular system which, from an initial conceptual idea, opens to “exponential expansions, a potentially infinite number” of realized works.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

 

The present work projects forward in space, towards the viewer, in a bold, right-angled contrast to the flat surface of its supporting wall. This spatial relation emphasizes Judd’s belief in the importance of an artwork’s physical presence, the value of its volume in a room. The diffuse effect of direct light casts a silvery halo around the work, which focuses the viewer’s awareness of the physicality of the object itself, and its relationship to the space around it. The work is both static and weightless; almost electric in its formal purity. In this way, Untitled actualizes the very core of Judd’s artistic practice, which Roberta Smith succinctly described in 1975: Untitled holds “a concept of order which is a denial of most kinds of order; it is an insistence on the independence of things, a commitment fundamental to both his art and his life.”^iv

 

 

ⁱ Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8, 1965, reproduced in Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975, pp. 181-189.

ⁱⁱ “Chronology,” Judd Foundation, accessed Oct. 2023, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemic in the Sixties, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 208.

^iv Roberta Smith, “Introduction,” Donald Judd, exh. cat. and cat. rais., The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1975, p. 3.