By now the story is familiar. The aspiring young artist, coming of age during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, determines that his art will have none of that movement’s metaphysical aspirations. For him, material and process—the physical paint itself and the act of creation—will convey no larger spiritual ideas. Instead, the work of art is to mean only what can be physically perceived by the viewer. This young aspirant goes on to make his name with reductive box sculptures which quickly take their place among the emblematic statements of a particular moment in American art, the Sixties.
The artist, of course, is Donald Judd, and he has lately been the subject of a travelling retrospective exhibition which opened at the Whitney Museum in New York.1[1] Judd’s work isn’t perfectly suited for a large exhibition. The meager visual rewards it offers make it the sort of sculpture one finds oneself more content to think about than to look at for very long. But the show proved to be far more illuminating than expected, not least for the way it afforded a perspective on what is happening in sculpture at the moment.
In an essay on Cézanne, Lawrence Gowing has observed that one could almost write a history of art by tracing the way succeeding generations of artists have misinterpreted the masters who influenced them. This is certainly true of Donald Judd’s followers. Most of them have limited themselves to borrowing his reductiveness, his austere
