Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Tag: Donald Judd

April 8, 2026

Christopher Wool

Installation view, Christopher Wool: See Stop Run West Texas, Brite Building, Marfa, Texas, May 2, 2025–May 2027. Photo: Christopher Wool

When Donald Judd began buying up property in Marfa, a remote West Texas town in a terrain of grassy high desert strewn with cattle ranches and sudden squat hills, he was looking for a new context for his art. More specifically: He was looking to free himself from the predominant context for art in that time (the 1970s) and place. “The art world in New York is terrible and has been terrible for a long time,” he later said. “I am very much against the museums and the critics and the business in New York.”1 In Marfa Judd aimed to install his work in perfect conditions and leave it there in perpetuity.

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June 1, 2022

Larry Bell

‘Pacific Red (II)’ (2017) at the Whitney Museum © Larry Bell. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Timothy Schenk

Although he has lived in Taos, New Mexico, since 1973, Larry Bell is still chiefly associated with the Light and Space movement that emerged in southern California in the 1960s. His early works epitomised the group: semi-mirrored glass cubes that, through their fleeting reflectivity, reacted to — as advertised — the light and space around them, deft exercises in highlighting the processes of perception.

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August 28, 2013

Donald Judd

Donald Judd, 101 Spring Street, 1970. Photo by Paul Katz.
© Judd Foundation. Courtesy Judd Foundation Archives

 

How do you feel about the term Minimal Art?’ asks the art historian Barbara Rose. ‘Well I don’t like it,’ replies Donald Judd, leaning into the table and smiling shyly. ‘What’s minimal about it?’ Scattered across the bare floorboards of the warehouse loft behind him are a tricycle, a child’s painting, a small forest of cacti in terracotta pots, a toy truck and an open trunk. Read the rest of this entry »