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

 

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