Donald Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ and how they Revolutionised The Art World

Donald Clarence Judd (1928–1994) is regarded as one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century art. Born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, he studied philosophy and art history at Columbia University and attended the Art Students League of New York between 1946 and 1947. From 1959 to 1965 he wrote extensively for Arts Magazine, producing a body of criticism noted for its analytical precision and intellectual independence. These writings articulated the principles that would define his later practice: clarity of form, avoidance of illusion, and a conviction that art should exist as an autonomous physical reality.
 
Judd began as a painter and was still working in two dimensions in 1961, but that year, influenced by artists like Rauschenberg, Chamberlain, and Kusama who were transforming the art world, he began creating shallow reliefs that shifted into three-dimensional space. By 1962, his objects had moved off the wall and into space, initiating a decisive shift away from painting and toward works rooted in real spatial presence. These early reliefs marked the start of a new direction in his work, representing a formative period defined by steady and persistent exploration. Through 1963 and 1964, Judd engaged in extensive sketching, experimentation, and a process of trial and error. He was developing a language that, although he may not have fully understood it at the time, had no clear precedent. His goal was not to refine existing forms, but to create something fundamentally new.

In 1964 Judd formalised his position in the essay Specific Objects, which proposed a new category of art defined by material and spatial exactness. He argued that the conventional divisions between painting and sculpture were obsolete, and that the work of art should be understood as an independent object defined by proportion, scale, and light. While his work was later associated with Minimalism, Judd himself rejected that classification, emphasising that his works were not reductive but specific, conceived to engage the viewer through direct physical experience rather than symbolic meaning.
 
Judd’s decision not to title his works reflects his intention to avoid narrative or metaphorical interpretation. Each piece exists as a self-contained entity whose meaning lies in its structure, materials, and spatial relationships. He sought a condition of absolute visual and conceptual clarity in which proportion and surface could determine the work’s identity.
 
Fabrication was central to Judd’s methodology. His father, a skilled carpenter, assisted in constructing early wooden works and transmitted a respect for precision that informed Judd’s later collaborations with industrial workshops such as Lippincott Inc. in Connecticut and The Bernstein Brothers in New York. These partnerships enabled him to achieve a level of accuracy unattainable by hand fabrication. Although produced using industrial techniques, the works were not products of mass production but unique objects made to exact specifications. As Judd observed in 1987, “I like the quality of mass production, but I want them to do one or two, and that just makes a mess.”

Judd employed a wide range of materials including galvanized iron, stainless steel, copper, brass, anodised aluminium, and natural woods. Each was selected for its intrinsic qualities—surface, reflectivity, colour, and weight—rather than as a neutral support. He avoided any treatment that would disguise the material, allowing it to define the visual outcome. As curator Barbara Haskell has noted, Judd’s approach “substantiated his implicit claim that every material possessed formal properties that belonged to it alone, and that the artist must limit himself to those properties to allow the materials to speak.”

Donald Judd developed several key series that defined his artistic practice and embodied his philosophy of clarity, precision, and spatial presence. Among his most iconic forms were the stacks, which could be composed of either single or multiple units mounted vertically on the wall, evenly spaced to integrate the wall itself into the work. These began with galvanized iron and later included coloured Plexiglas, which introduced light and transparency as active components. For Judd, the stack was not merely a repeated format but a conceptual framework. Donald Judd once wrote that an artist’s primary challenge is to find “the concatenation that will grow,” meaning an artist must discover a formal or conceptual pursuit capable of sustaining ongoing development rather than fading after just a second or third iteration. For Judd, the stack offered a stable structure that supported continual experimentation, making it a form he could return to throughout his career. Although he worked within a repeated format, he believed each piece should be entirely distinct, defined by precise variations in material, and colour. This focus on specificity informed his use of the term “specific objects,” emphasising how a single form could generate a wide range of visual and perceptual experiences.

Another key series was the progressions, typically horizontal floor or wall works based on mathematical systems such as arithmetic or Fibonacci sequences. These works often featured L-shaped aluminium profiles or rectangular blocks that changed incrementally in size or spacing, creating a sense of logical progression. The boxes, another essential series, consisted of floor-based rectangular forms, often presented singly or in rows, that asserted their presence as independent objects in space. These works highlighted Judd’s interest in spatial autonomy and the idea that the floor and room were integral to the work’s perception. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Judd developed the multicoloured works, where he applied industrial enamel paints or anodised aluminium finishes in bold colours to his forms, emphasising colour as a structural and spatial element rather than a decorative one. He also extended his visual language into furniture design and large-scale, site-specific installations, most notably in Marfa, Texas, where he created permanent environments that unified art, architecture, and landscape.

As Judd moved into larger spaces, first the five‑story cast‑iron building in Soho, New York in 1968 and later the vast landscape of Marfa, Texas, his work expanded in both scale and intention. The New York loft allowed him to permanently install his work and explore its relationship with the surrounding space, and today it is preserved by the Judd Foundation. Marfa provided the freedom to create monumental, site-specific pieces that transformed the idea of sculpture. Apart from the permanent installations in Marfa and SoHo, Judd did not demand a fixed context for displaying his work, though he remained deeply attentive to the conditions in which it was experienced. Judd believed his work should be given the room enough room to exist at its fullest potential, to resonate, to breathe. 

Donald Judd’s legacy lies not only in the physical clarity and rigor of his work but in his radical redefinition of what art could be. By rejecting illusion, narrative, and traditional boundaries between mediums, he forged a new path focused on material, space, and perception. His insistence on specificity over symbolism, and his embrace of industrial processes without compromising individuality, positioned his practice as  a break from the past. Although Judd rejected the title of designer, his formal vocabulary has had a lasting influence on architecture, furniture, and contemporary industrial design. As art critic Jerry Saltz observed, “You know Donald Judd’s work even if you don’t know you know it. He is in the buildings we live in, the furniture we sit on, our workspaces, even iPhone design.” Judd’s concern with structure, measurement, and honesty of materials has extended far beyond the field of art into the visual language of modern life.