Quotes By Donald Judd

Tolstoy may not be showing that much of Russia at that time even. It's hard to tell. You tend to associate the quality of the period with what's lasted - what's still good. And that quality becomes the whole period.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.

After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.

Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.

Pollock looks unusual and radical even now.

Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.

I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality.

But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.

There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for.

I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.

I don't think geometric art is... I don't like to call it that. I don't think it's any more pure than pop art or anything else. It doesn't have anything to do with purity.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once.

The attitude and capacity of the factory, the old metal table and the new ideas of the wooden furniture quickly and naturally suggested the possibility of metal furniture.

Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.

I haven't sufficient interest in objects or anything I can see around me to do what Oldenburg does.

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

Well, its very exasperating when you can't get it right.

And then we moved to New Jersey and I went to the Art Students League.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.

I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

You're only dealing with whatever you know, which is a very small part of it and later on it'll look like it has something to do with the period. Obviously, the artists have something to do with one another. They tend to set up certain common qualities among themselves.