“Serial, minimal, orthogonal and architectural [the woodcuts] stand for beauty, clarity and enlightenment.”
—Jörg Schellman
When Donald Judd first approached the medium of woodcut in 1953, he was initially apprehensive. The messy and physical carving process did not appeal to the artist who abhorred the idea of working with manual tools or his hands. Judd found serendipitous solace in his discovery of birch – a hard wood that can be carved to create defined lines with sharp, clean edges. However, the carving of straight lines in all directions added an additional layer of difficulty due to the requirement to cut across the grain. As Judd lacked the tools and knowledge to create defined lines, he sought advice from his father who was skilled in woodworking. In 1963, the father-son duo developed a collaboration for Judd’s first large-scale series of prints; Judd directed the concept and his father Roy took on the burden of physical labour, allowing the artist to explore without hindrance the potential of the medium’s structured rectilinear forms.
Untitled (S. 198) is defined by clean-cut boundaries of black and unprinted paper that are interrupted by delineations of green and red that segment the composition into contained sections. Judd makes use of positive and negative space, using only solid blocks of coloured ink where he wanted to make an impression. The unprinted spaces nevertheless retain the same significance as the bold shapes of green, red and black, with the dichotomy between void and vibrant interrogating the traditional divisions of pictorial space. In his seminal essay of 1993 Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular, Judd asserted that “no immediate feeling can be attributed to color. Nothing can be identified…If there were an identifiable feeling to red or to black…[it] would not be useable to me. Color, like material, is what art is made from.” Untitled (S. 198) demonstrates the use of colour as a vehicle for building art, placing emphasis on the formal elements rather than asserting emotion. In his reduction of pictorial language as part of the wider Minimalism movement, Judd’s woodcut prints emphasise only what is immediately visible: complete, singular and unified forms.
