Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates is pleased to announce the placement of "Untitled (DSS 89)” (1966–1969) by Donald Judd into the collection of an esteemed private collector.
Donald Clarence Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, in 1928. After military service in Korea, he studied at the Art Students League of New York before entering Columbia University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in philosophy in 1953 and a Master of Arts in art history in 1962 under the eminent art historian Meyer Schapiro. From 1959 to 1965, he worked as an art critic for Arts Magazine, contributing hundreds of reviews while developing his own practice — an unusual combination that meant his landmark 1965 essay "Specific Objects," published in Arts Yearbook 8, was not the speculation of a theorist but the position statement of a working artist who had spent six years watching closely what was happening in New York studios and galleries. His argument was precise and categorical: the most significant new work was "neither painting nor sculpture" in any conventional sense, but a category of object that occupied real space without representing anything. "Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface," he wrote. "Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism."
By the early 1960s, Judd had stopped painting entirely. He had concluded that painting, however radically executed, could not escape the fundamental problem of illusionism: the fiction of depth that a flat surface inevitably implies. He began producing three-dimensional objects, at first combining paint, wood, and metal in configurations that resisted categorization as either sculpture or painting. By 1964 and 1965, he was working exclusively with industrial fabricators — metalworkers and plastics suppliers in New York and New Jersey — providing precise specifications that craftsmen executed without the artist's physical involvement. The absence of the artist's hand was as deliberate as any formal decision he made. For Judd, the mark of touch carried too much of the old vocabulary of feeling and expression he wanted to eliminate. The fabricated surface was neutral in a way that no brushstroke or chisel mark could be.
Three formal principles define the objects of this period. First, industrial fabrication and the total removal of the artist's hand from the making. Second, the use of industrial materials — galvanized iron, brass, copper, stainless steel, and colored Plexiglas — chosen for their specific optical and physical properties rather than their symbolism or cultural resonance. Plexiglas in particular gave Judd something painting could not: actual color existing as a material property rather than a pictorial illusion. The light that passes through a sheet of amber Plexiglas is physically different from amber pigment on a surface, and Judd understood and used this distinction with precision. Third, the rejection of what he called "relational" composition — the hierarchical organization of parts toward a dominant center that had characterized most sculpture before him. His alternative was repetition and sequence: forms that accumulated without hierarchy, organized not by aesthetic judgment but by a predetermined rule.
The stack is the form with which Judd is most completely identified, and the works of 1966–1969 are its defining examples. The format is exact: ten cantilevered units projecting from a wall, each identical to the next, separated by intervals equal in depth to each unit's projection, with the bottom unit sitting at the same distance from the floor as the interval between units, and the top unit at the same distance from the ceiling. A complete stack spans the full height of a room; the installation requirement is a condition of the work's meaning. The stack does not occupy the wall. As Rosalind Krauss wrote in her 1977 study "Passages in Modern Sculpture," the definitive scholarly account of Judd's formal logic: "The elements of Judd's work do not compose a visual field. They enumerate one."
The first stacks were made in 1965 in galvanized iron. Judd refined the format through 1966 into the canonical small-stack dimensions — 6 × 27 × 24 inches per unit — and began introducing different material combinations: brass, copper, and stainless steel for the structural body, and Plexiglas in various colors for the top and bottom faces. Each combination produced a different optical character, and Judd treated these differences as seriously as any formal decision. In a 1988 conversation published in Flash Art, he stated: "Color is a property of a surface or of a material. I'm not interested in the psychological or emotional connotations of color. I'm interested in it as a physical fact."
Amber Plexiglas is among the rarest and most visually distinguished of the colorways Judd employed in the stack series. Where blue or green Plexiglas creates a cool, almost clinical light, amber transmits a warm, golden luminescence outward and downward from the face of each unit, casting a diffuse glow against the surrounding wall that transforms the space immediately around the object. In a complete ten-unit stack, this effect multiplies across the full intervals of the work; in a single unit such as DSS 89, it concentrates into a sustained zone of warmth that makes the wall itself part of the work's visual field. The amber Plexiglas and stainless steel configuration is, by any connoisseurial measure, the most optically alive and chromatically distinguished combination Judd used in this series — and the rarest in institutional and private collections alike.
"Untitled (DSS 89)” was first fabricated on August 1, 1966, within months of Judd's inaugural solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, the most influential gallery in American contemporary art of the period, where the stacks made their public debut. Within weeks of that exhibition, several stacks were selected for inclusion in "Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors" at the Jewish Museum, New York (April 27–June 12, 1966), organized by curator Kynaston McShine. Primary Structures remains the most significant group exhibition of the Minimalist movement: forty-two artists participated, among them Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt. The exhibition was the first large-scale public articulation of a shared aesthetic position — that the most advanced sculpture of the moment was concerned with actual space, industrial materials, and serial structure rather than representation, composition, or the trace of the artist's hand — and Judd's stacks were among the works that most completely exemplified it.
The critical debate surrounding the work was immediate and substantive. Michael Fried's influential 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood," published in Artforum, mounted the most serious contemporary challenge: arguing that Judd's "literalist" insistence on real space and real materials amounted to "theatricality" rather than art. Fried's argument has never been fully resolved, and it continues to frame scholarly discussion of Minimalism. But what is clear in retrospect is that the qualities Fried identified as problematic — the work's activation of the viewer's space, its refusal to exist independently of the room it occupies — are precisely the qualities that have made the stacks so central to the subsequent history of art. Every serious work of installation art made after 1970 engages, consciously or not, with the argument Judd's stacks had already settled in practice.
Judd was represented by Leo Castelli from 1966 onward — DSS 89 carries direct provenance from the gallery — and participated in documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968. That same year, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, presented the first major museum survey of his work: "Don Judd" (February 27–April 14, 1968), curated by William C. Agee, bringing together thirty-one works from 1962 to 1968 and generating the most concentrated critical attention his practice had received to that point. His first major European retrospective followed in 1970, organized by Jean Leering at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and traveling to Museum Folkwang, Essen; Kunstverein Hannover; and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. A further retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum (May–July 1971), curated by John Coplans, established Judd's standing on the West Coast; the accompanying interview with the artist, published in Artforum, remains a key document for understanding the theoretical commitments behind the stacks. The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, organized a comprehensive retrospective in 1975, coinciding with the publication of the authoritative catalogue raisonné — compiled by Dudley Del Balso, Roberta Smith, and Brydon Smith — which established the definitive scholarly framework for Judd's work from 1960 to 1974 and remains the foundational document for all subsequent engagement with works of this period. DSS 89 is catalogued as entry eighty-nine in that publication.
In the early 1970s, Judd began acquiring property in Marfa, a small town in the high desert of West Texas, relocating there permanently and establishing the Chinati Foundation and the Judd Foundation — permanent installations of his own work and the work of artists he admired, designed to exist outside the cycle of galleries, auctions, and temporary exhibitions. He died unexpectedly of lymphoma in New York in 1994, at the age of sixty-five. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a comprehensive retrospective in 1988, and Tate Modern, London, presented a major survey in 2004. The retrospective "Judd" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (March 2020–January 2021) was the largest exhibition ever dedicated to the artist and the most authoritative institutional statement of his standing in the history of postwar sculpture. The stacks of 1966–1969 occupied the central galleries of the presentation, and the exhibition confirmed — definitively — their status as the canonical form through which Judd's contribution to twentieth-century art is most completely understood.
The institutional absorption of the founding-generation stacks is extensive and well-documented. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, holds a single-unit brass and Plexiglas work from 1969 on near-continuous display in its postwar galleries. The Art Institute of Chicago holds a ten-unit stainless steel and amber Plexiglas stack from 1968, acquired in 2014 after more than fifteen years of searching and the assembly of eight separate acquisition funds. The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, acquired a stainless steel and blue Plexiglas stack directly from Leo Castelli Gallery in 1969. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Kunstmuseum Basel hold further significant examples from this period. The Judd Foundation maintains permanent installations across 101 Spring Street in New York and The Block in Marfa.
Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates is honored to have facilitated this acquisition on behalf of a distinguished private collection.