From the vantage point of the present, DSS 25 is a seminal work in the career of a brilliant artist who continued to work and change for more than three decades. It embodies Judd’s earliest explorations into a future he then could not see but trusted himself to find.
Among the first defining masterworks of Donald Judd’s celebrated oeuvre, Untitled (DSS 25) is the ultimate testament to the rigorous pursuit of artistic truths that has come to characterize his singular legacy within the course of modern and contemporary sculpture. Executed in 1962, this groundbreaking work marks the moment at which Judd’s mature ideas crystallized in full, launching him upon the fervent interrogation of essential artistic truths that would dominate his practice for the next three decades. In this exceptional piece, Judd combines a central expanse of wood, its surface painted in the artist’s iconic shade of cadmium red and richly variegated with the addition of sand, with elegant upper and lower margins of gently sloping galvanized iron to create his first three-dimensional wall relief; a staggering artistic breakthrough which marked the artist’s radical shift away from painting in pursuit of a truer and unmediated form of art.
Describing the singular importance of the present work, one scholar describes, “The fact that a conventional painting, as it were, blindly seemed to lay claim to a space of its own was what Judd was challenging with his new works. His move from the flat picture to the relief had opened up entirely new ground in the domains of New York art. For around three years he declared…he had not been able to get anywhere with his painting until he had the idea, in his wall piece with the shovel-shaped edges, to make curved iron surface both above and below…And as he went on to explain, these works had taken him by surprise, had seemed strange, hard to understand, and all the better for that.” (Thomas Kellein, in Exh. Cat., Kunsthalle Bielefled, Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955-1968, 2002, p.39.)
Donald Judd’s Masterful Mix of Medium
In 1962-1963, Judd produced four more variations on the form of the present sculpture: DSS 34, DSS 40, DSS 42, and DSS 43, the first three of which are held in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel, Judd Foundation, and Fondazione Prada, respectively. DSS 25 is the first sculpture in this group and the impact of its vibrant, textured cadmium red surface is as profound now as it was in 1962. That same year, Judd installed the sister work, DSS 34, in the seminal show New Work: Part I at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in New York, alongside works by Judd’s contemporaries and close friends Yayoi Kusama and Dan Flavin, among others; several months later, the direct counterpart to the subject work in scale, DSS 40, now in the collection of the Judd Foundation, was presented in the artist’s first groundbreaking solo exhibition of work in three-dimensions. Acquired by Lewis V. Winter from the Green Gallery in 1963 and remaining in the Winter family collection since, DSS 25 is a work that marks the genesis of Donald Judd’s radical artistic vision—a vision that would have a lasting and powerful impact on future generations and how we look at art.
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Untitled (DSS 34), 1962
Regarded as the leading figure of Minimalism (although Judd himself rejected this categorization) and amongst the most influential American artists of the 20th century,
25, as the first wall relief, represents the origin of Judd’s challenge to the thematic allusion and illusionism which had, for centuries, defined the paintings of canonical art history. Unlike such titans of abstraction as Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and Still—all of whom Judd considered as immediate precedents for his practice—in 1960-1961, Judd came to the inevitable conclusion that painting, no matter how abstract, how reductive, contained some degree of illusionism. As phrased by the artist in his famous treatise “Specific Objects,” written in the years immediately following the production of the present work:
“One of the first three-dimensional ones started off as a piece of canvas from a failed painting that I tried to turn up, but I couldn't make the canvas turn up evenly. So after a while it occurred to me to change the material and use something that would curve naturally. I threw out the piece of canvas and replaced it with galvanized iron. The relief is galvanized iron and painted plywood. It's the first really three-dimensional relief."
Among the first works to challenge such subordination of the parts to the whole, the initial vision which informed the shape of DSS 25 was, in fact, a painting; asked to describe the impetus behind the present work and the critical shift in dimensionality it represents, Judd recalls, “One of the first three-dimensional ones started off as a piece of canvas from a failed painting that I tried to turn up, but I couldn't make the canvas turn up evenly. So after a while it occurred to me to change the material and use something that would curve naturally. I threw out the piece of canvas and replaced it with galvanized iron. The relief is galvanized iron and painted plywood. It's the first really three-dimensional relief." (The artist cited in Exh. Cat., Pasadena Art Museum, Don Judd, 1971, p. 21)
By mixing sand into the cadmium red pigment of the central wooden expanse, Judd creates an explicitly variegated contrast that strikes a riveting surface with the sleek, industrial economy of the galvanized iron margins. Describing the present work in his essay for the artist’s major early survey at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1975, in which the present DSS 25, as well as sister works DSS 42 and DSS 43, were notably included, Brydon Smith notes: “The galvanized iron is not as extraneous or eccentric as the centered objects; it is more neutral, its use more extensive. The piece is a single shape; two kinds of areas, flat and curved, using two kinds of flat material. The curves reach into space, but the flatness is continuous.” (Dudley Del Balso, Roberta Smith and Brydon Smith, Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Objects and Wood-Blocks 1960-1974, Ottawa, 1975, p. 20-21) In its magnificent union of distinct materials, dimensionalities, and hue, DSS 25 represents one of the first instances in which a holistic sculpture emerges through Judd’s deft combination of seemingly contrary parts: the triumphant realization of “the thing as a whole.”
In its austere elegance and rigorous, uncompromising candor, DSS 25 stands as the original physical embodiment of Judd’s iconic statement that:
“Material, space, and color are the main aspects of visual art.”
Yet even within the self-imposed formal economy of the present work, Judd produces a sculpture of extraordinary visual complexity, a richness derived largely from the implicit tensions between the nature of his chosen materials. In his combination of galvanized metal with the sumptuously textured surface of cadmium red oil paint and sand, Judd enacts a fascinating frisson between saturated surfaces and gleaming monochrome, industrial materiality and rich artistic verve, geometric severity and luxuriant hue. As described by Barbara Haskell, these distinctions “substantiated Judd’s implicit claim that every material possessed formal properties that belonged to it alone and the artist must limit himself that best allowed the materials to speak. Materials were the parts of speech of sculpture. Their properties—surface, color, thickness, and weight—were sufficient to substitute for the role traditionally filled by ornamentation.” (Barbara Haskell, “Donald Judd: Beyond Formalism,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and traveling), Donald Judd, 1988, p. 73)
Speaking in his own, more succinct terms, Judd notes: “It is one kind of skepticism to make the work so strong and material that it can only assert itself.” (the artist cited in Ibid., p. 42) By coupling the stark geometry of his forms with naturally engaging surfaces, Judd exploited the inherent opulence of his materials to create a sculpture of immediate and enduring visual interest. Set against the steely contours of the metal crest and base, the vibrant clarity of Judd’s cadmium red is emphatically heightened, confronting the viewer with a saturated intensity that rivals the most dazzling canvases of the sculptor’s Abstract Expressionist predecessors. Triumphantly foreshadowing the brilliant sculptural oeuvre that would follow DSS 25 epitomizes the essential purpose behind the entirety of Judd’s artistic output: to determine the boundaries of what art can express as true. Here, in pursuit of an artistic mode so precise, so definitive, so aesthetically unequivocal as to be beyond the slightest ambiguity, Judd at last breaks with the medium of painting, jettisoning the two dimensional in favor of a truly “specific object;” in so doing, he discovered the wholly innovative vocabulary of sculptural forms that would radically and incontrovertibly alter the course of 20th Century art.
