A Retrospective
March 1 — July 11, 2020
The Museum of Modern Art’s vast retrospective titled Judd unveils the entire scope of Donald Judd’s art career that focused on color and modularity from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Judd opens with a series of sculptural negotiations, painted in cadmium red light, that investigate the limits and interrelations of the circle, cylinder, square and rectangle. Each piece appears to sway one way or another within the museum’s exhibition space since the artist was intent on capturing real space — which also meant real time — into the body of single works of art.
Donald Judd studied art history at Columbia University in 1957, where students continued to absorb elements of Bauhaus theory that had been introduced to the curriculum by Werner Drewes from 1937 to 1940. In 1958, Mies van der Rohe had completed the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City where the dark glass windows appeared synonymous with the black, steel frame. At night, the transparent windows were lit with bright yellow, bringing to life a modular architectural idea that had originated in Prewar Germany. By the end of 1960, Systems Theory functioned as a lens to view postwar society, and the aesthetic conversations in art schools continued to focus on painterly expressionism as well as Bauhaus philosophy.
