Behind the Print | Donald Judd – Untitled 1992

Executed two years before Donald Judd’s (1928–1994) death, this set of Untitled woodcuts is emblematic of the artist’s final investigations into the nature of perception. This complete suite features four variations of a geometric image, rendered in chromium green and printed on fibrous Japanese paper. A masterly expression of Judd’s signature experiments with the binary of space and form, Untitled exemplifies the striking corpus of graphic work Judd produced over four decades.

Printmaking played a key role in Judd’s approach as early as 1951, when he designed his first lithographs while studying printmaking methods at the Art Students League in New York. Two years later, he began to explore the distinct materiality of woodcuts, which soon became the artist’s preferred print medium and visibly informed the clean lines and spatial configurations of his later sculptures. With its resulting crisp, angular contours, the hard birch blocks allowed Judd to achieve the increasingly geometric aesthetic he was seeking. “Perhaps Judd’s affection for prints has to do with the making of prints as the result of the making of an object—a wooden block in which actual lines and shapes are cut out…and looking at the impression of such an object on a sheet of paper,” Judd scholar Mariette Josephus Jitta speculated. “It is an object with its own precision, its own denseness and color, transferred to a piece of paper with a different texture…It also happens that such a woodblock becomes an independent object after the process of the printing.”

As with his industrially produced sculptures, Judd wished to remove from his prints all trace of the artist’s hand, fearing any sign of physical labor would distract from his conceptual concerns. This desire soon caused him to turn to his father, Roy C. Judd, an expert woodworker with the skills to more clearly articulate the artist’s ideas. Judd’s father both carved the blocks and printed many of the artist’s early editions. Later prints like this set, were made in professional printmaking workshops notably Derrière l’Etoile Studios in New York. This set of four Untitled woodcuts fluently translates Judd’s ambitions into two dimensions and are among his finest achievements in the medium.