Donald Judd Writings

Donald Judd Writings is the most comprehensive collection of the artist’s writings assembled to date, including Judd’s best-known essays, little-known texts, unpublished manuscripts, and letters. Moreover, this collection also includes unpublished college essays and hundreds of never-before-seen notes, a critical part of Judd’s writing practice.

Judd’s earliest published writing, consisting largely of art reviews for hire, defined the terms of art criticism in the 1960s. His essays as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, published here for the first time, contain the seeds of this later writing, and allow readers to trace the development of his critical style. The writings that followed Judd’s early reviews are no less significant, but were often published in limited editions and have remained largely unavailable until now. Judd’s unpublished notes are transcribed from his handwritten accounts of and reactions to subjects ranging from the politics of his time to the literary texts he admired most. In these intimate reflections we see Judd’s thinking at his least mediated – a mind continuing to grapple with questions of its moment, thinking them through, changing positions, and demonstrating the intensity of thought that continues to make Judd such a formidable presence in contemporary visual art.