Ad and Artists
Donald Judd
1962
Donald Judd:
Here’s a speech I made last week in a Michigan museum, last month in a Wisconsin art center, last spring in a California museum and last year in two places in New Jersey. You know anything about New Jersey? I’ve been saying this for almost ten years and whenever anyone asks me to talk I say it again and whenever anyone asks me for an article I write it again and now I seem to have it down a little neater and so I am shooting it out to all kinds of art-places and outer-spaces. Couple of fellows with a movie camera were taking test-shots in my studio last summer but they didn’t give me much of a chance to “act” but this might be a sound-track. Do you live with Yasuo (?) Kusama? Do you know that “Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel” in Paris? Yvaral and his wife came to see me this past summer, son of Vasarely, gave me booklet on international movement, miss Kusama, representing New York, I couldn’t read all those manifestos, all in French. Here’s my speech, last words, before it appears in twenty-six languages.
—Ad Reinhardt
19 Nov 1962
Ad Reinhardt:
Thanks for the English version of your speech. It was lucid and will be useful when I do that article—about which I feel pretty guilty for being so slow. The one history, as an instance, is an awesome procession, as the whole is as well. As you say, they are your rules. I agree with some, partially agree with others and disagree with others, especially, as a general consideration, the one evolution. Yayoi had shown me the booklet—the Paris group. She has the loft below mine and lives with an architect, which is a fact not to be disclosed to Japanese society. I didn’t notice though that Yvaral was Vasarely’s son. It would be interesting to see a first-class show of Vasarely’s. Thanks again.
—Don Judd
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Donald Judd: Maker, Baker
By Elizabeth BuheAPRIL 2020 | ArtSeen
Crisp, clean, cool, no-frills, matter-of-factthese and similar adjectives constitute a familiar lexicon for the work currently on display in Judd, the appropriately tight, monosyllabic title MoMA has given its Donald Judd retrospective, the first in New York in over 30 years.

Donald Judd
By Lyle RexerNOV 2020 | ArtSeen
From a distance of decades, its easier to see Judds veiled polemic for what it was: opinion masquerading as analysis and intuition supported primarily by his own practice. At the same distance, through two major exhibitions, its possible to see and feel intensely what Judd accomplished.
John Chamberlain & Donald Judd
By Barbara A. MacAdamDEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen
So far and yet so near, the antithetical aesthetics of John Chamberlain and Donald Judd are provocatively at play in this compelling show of sculptures, wall pieces, and paintings from the 1960s and 70s. The artists could be considered the alpha and omega of 20th century American sculpture.
RICHARD SHIFF with Jessamine Batario
OCT 2020 | Art
We connected via Zoom to discuss Shiff's most recent publication, Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd (2020).