Estimated Price:

   $   

Realized Price:

   $   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

1928-1994
UNTITLED (DSS 18)

UNTITLED (DSS 18)

48 1/8 x 60 1/4 in. 122.3 x 153 cm.

liquitex and sand on masonite

Executed in 1961.

PROVENANCE

Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea, Minneapolis
Private Collection, France
Christie's, New York, May 11, 2004, lot 52
Acquired by the present owner from the above

EXHIBITED

Minneapolis, Locksley Shea Gallery, Small Scale Sculpture, March 1973
New York, Blum Helman Gallery, Donald Judd: Early Works, November - December 1983
New York, Vivian Horan Gallery, 1988
New York, Blum Helman Gallery, Sculpture, January - February 1994

LITERATURE

Dudley del Balso, Brydon Smith & Roberta Smith, Donald Judd: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Objects, and Wood Blocks 1960-1974, Ottawa, 1975, cat. no. DSS 18, p. 104, illustrated

NOTE

Untitled (DSS18) is one of Judd's major compositions from the seminal and epiphanic period of discovery that occurred between 1961 and 1962, in which the artist conceived his unique syntax of reductive, highly distilled geometric form and elaborated his profoundly complex ideology. While Judd is best known for his three-dimensional work dubbed Specific Objects, he always rejected the term Sculptor and always insisted that his work had greater affinities to the faculty of painting from which it derived. With its pared-down, non-referential form and vibrant cadmium red surface, Untitled (DSS18) is a singularly important formative painting which presages his artistically assured 1963 entrance onto the New York art scene and sheds a candid light on the complexity of the path that he undertook for the next three decades.

While recent retrospectives have suggested that Judd's oeuvre began in 1960, Judd had already been painting for over a decade by that time producing academic compositions that were heavily influenced by the tenets of Abstract Expressionism which was the predominant idiom throughout the 1950s. It was not until 1961, however, that his mature views on art were crystallised through an erudite study of the intellectual and historical foundations of contemporary art at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro. Concurrently, Judd was becoming an outspoken, prolific and respected art critic, contributing to Art News and later Arts International. Publishing scholarly articles on Lee Bontecou, John Wesley and John Chamberlain among others, the critical aspect of writing forced Judd to hone his thoughts and concisely express the validity in what he saw. Practitioner and theorist, Judd occupied the intellectual high ground, devising an artistic lexicon that manifested and distilled his theoretical stance.

Judd's move to a new apartment at 53 East 19^th Street in 1960 was the harbinger of a drastic stylistic and aesthetic change. There he painted over earlier compositions, replacing the formerly earthy, ochre illusions of landscape and depth -- surrogates for fields and wide open spaces -- with insistently flat, unusually frontal surfaces. This departure from artistic representation, the abandonment of traditional modes of composition and references to things outside the canvas, freed his paintings of any lingering remnants of representation. Instead, the individual components of his painting -- material, space and colour -- were to form a coherent whole in which their interrelationships played an integral role.

Untitled is paradigmatic of this internal coherence, signalling his departure from the world of painting and arrival in a world of facts. Alongside Dan Flavin, Ad Reinhart, Frank Stella and Barnett Newman, here Judd completely renounces illusionism. The picture plane, reduced to just a few elements, reveals Judd's newfound allegiance to colour and a high level of clarity. As Thomas Kellen has perceptively observed: "It was no longer a matter of devising forms; evidently it was already about uncontrived pigments that would draw the viewer into the work, pigments that were more tone than colour, more substance than semblance, one might say." (Thomas Kellen, Donald Judd Early Work: 1955-1968, New York 2002, p. 35).

In Untitled we witness the synthesis of a number of influences into Judd's unique iconography. The use of the colour field punctuated with a single linear form derives from Newman while the use of the expressive, encrusted surface belies Judd's fascination with Yves Klein's monochromes. In the present work Judd mixes particles of sand with his Cadmium pigments, a practice he began in 1960. This lends the picture a restless, rough finish and a haptic quality that causes it to lose its sense of depth, very much in line with Klein. The linear excisions and hairpin forms create a directional system which gives the composition a focus that is to be accepted rather than read or interpreted as any representational or metaphysical truth. As Judd has stated: "I was trying to make the surface non-spatial and flat. It has to do with trying to make it just surface, without any idea of purity of materials, colour, or any restrictive notion." (Donald Judd interviewed by John Coplans, cited in Exh. Cat. Saitama, Museum of Modern Art, Donald Judd: 1960-1991, 1999, p. 155).

Although clearly not three-dimensional, the time factor involved in a beholder's interaction with Untitled introduces space into the equation. It was immediately after the present work that Judd started to introduce three-dimensional objects, such as baking tins, into his composition, embedding them into the planar surface to the point of non-recognition. A direct precursor to the Specific Objects which he first produced in the same year, in Untitled Judd demonstrates an art that is neither painting nor sculpture, but texture, structure and material. These exceptionally rare early paintings are critical works in the evolution of Judd's oeuvre and Untitled documents the very moment of transition, the point of departure, from which Judd launched his assault on the received ideologies of fine art practice.