Judd

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Donald Judd. _Drawing for wall pieces (cf. DSS 40)_. 1963. Pencil on paper. Sheet: 11 × 14 (27.9 × 35.6 cm). Kunstmuseum Basel. © 2020 Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Donald Judd. Drawing for wall pieces. 1963

Donald Judd. Drawing for wall pieces (cf. DSS 40). 1963. Pencil on paper. Sheet: 11 × 14 (27.9 × 35.6 cm). Kunstmuseum Basel. © 2020 Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Artist, Jamie Dearing: Don read all the time and drew all the time. And he used his drawing to work out his ideas. Unlike many sculptors, he didn't do mockups very often.

He did hundreds of drawings, sometimes, for a single piece, worked out proportions, worked out scale, chose material. But essentially they're incredibly rich, because they say so much about his thinking.

There's a good deal of arithmetic. And one of the reasons he left painting was, although they're incredibly lyrical and beautiful, they weren't offering him the kind of rigor and spatial investigation that he was after.