Donald Judd

Cooper/Kato, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1988

Donald Judd, Donald Judd Furniture: Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1993, pp. 9, 49, 76, 80 and 101

Donald Judd, Todd Eberle, Art + Design Donald Judd, exh. cat., Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, 1993, pp. 60 and 136

Peter Noever ed., Donald Judd: Architecture Architektur, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2003, p. 116

Wood Work, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, NY, October 25, 1997-October 9, 1998

Coming from the iconic collection of the late Emily Fisher Landau, Donald Judd’s Backward Slant Chair 84 and Forward Slant Chair 84 capture the polymath’s career-long pursuit of stripping his materials down to their purest form, a practice reflected across both his art and design. Borne out of a desire to create simultaneously simple and practical furniture, Judd’s chairs use basic materials and utilitarian forms that could be rigorously adapted and masterfully produced, resulting in lines of furniture that subtly vary from one version to the next. The present chairs, both variations of the artist’s iconic Chair 84 model, consist of flat sheets of black walnut bonded together to form a box-like whole, both differing in the diagonally placed boards slanting backwards and forwards, respectively, beneath the seat.

Best known as the father of American Minimalism (though he rejected the term), Judd eschewed categorization throughout his career, toeing the line between artist, designer, art critic, and theorist. Judd similarly regarded his objects to be in their own sphere, avoiding calling any of his creations art but rather “specific objects” that were intended to be detached from the traditional confines of rigid categories like painting or sculpture, instead stressing their three-dimensionality and the way that they occupy space. 

Typically limiting himself to sturdy, honest materials like metal and wood, Judd’s furniture rejects all ostentation, consisting of basic forms and straight lines that echo forms like the artist’s Stacks series. Especially seen in the Chair 84 series, Judd’s furniture was meant to serve singular purposes, emphasizing their functionality over all else. Whether it be sitting, reading, or laying, these forms were only meant to be used for their intended function; Judd, in his 1993 essay “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp,” remarks that “I am often told that the furniture is not comfortable…The furniture is comfortable to me. Rather than making a chair to sleep in…it is better to make a bed. A straight chair is best for eating or writing. The third position is standing” (Donald Judd, “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp,” 1993). While Judd insisted on the simplicity of form in the Chair 84, it was in the cubic recess underneath the seat that the artist most fully reflected his underlying desire to experiment; while in some instances the artist inserted a shelf below the seat, in the two present examples, the artist places a flat board of black walnut that in one case slants backwards into the seat, and in the other forward out from the seat and into the ground.