Donald Judd
American, 1928 - 1994
Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri on June 3, 1928. He served in the United States Army in Korea from 1946 to 1947. In 1953 he moved to New York City where he maintained a studio into the 1980s. In 1964 he married Margaret Hughan Finch and had two children, Flavin Starbuck and Rainer Yingling. After returning from Korea, Judd spent a short time studying at the Art Students League in New York. He was enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia from 1948 to 1949. From 1949 to 1953 he studied at Columbia University and at the Art Students League concurrently. Judd concentrated in philosophy while at Columbia, with emphasis on empiricism and pragmatism. In 1953 he graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science. In 1962 he received a Masters in Art History from Columbia. Starting in 1953, Judd taught at various institutions as the Chistadora Home and the Police Athletic League, the Allen Stevenson School, the Brooklyn Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. In 1959, Judd began his career as a critic and art writer. He served as a reviewer for Art News in 1959 and also moved to Arts Magazine where he was a contributing editor until 1965. In this year he also wrote reviews for Art International. His writings are compressed and concrete and have been compared to his later sculpture. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Judd began his art career as a painter, when Abstract Expressionism was still a strong force in New York. Judd began working in three dimensions around 1962, his first works of the period being reliefs, and soon after, pieces built for the floor. Judd began to work with boxes aftere attempts to translate field and support into real space. Judd’s work is in private and public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Canada.
