Few figures cast as cool a shadow over the history of American art as Donald Judd. Even before his 1964 manifesto “Specific Objects,” Judd had struck—through elliptical writing and the fabrication of perfectly machined boxes—a relentlessly Jacobin attitude toward “European art.” What he railed against—art with humanistic content—was as important as what he proposed: objects styled after a triumphalist American vernacular that included “most modern commercial buildings, new colonial stores, lobbies, most houses, most clothing, sheet aluminum.” If the original charms of Judd’s gnomic boxes and shelves have since become as common as air, much of that has to do with this artist’s... More >>>