‘Not so much a line as a star’: Donald Judd in the Low Countries, 1965–71

Abstract

Historiographical accounts of the American artist Donald Judd, and of Minimal art in general, have focused primarily on the debates surrounding the emergence of his work in the United States, and New York in particular, from the mid to late 1960s. Little is known about Judd’s early exposure in Europe in between the artist’s inclusion in a group show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 1965, up until his first solo show in Europe at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands in 1970. Judd’s rising reputation and fame in the United States in the second half of the 1960s, epitomized by the widely acclaimed solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968 and the Pasadena Art Museum in Pasadena California in 1971, have primarily shaped a picture of the artist’s early career as a predominantly American affair. In the light of the first US retrospective of Judd since his passing in 1994 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, opening in March 2020, this essay aims to map the early exposure of Judd in Europe, and in the Netherlands in particular. Based on hitherto unpublished material from archives in Belgium and The Netherlands, this essay intends to critically map the early moments of exposure of Judd’s work in the Low Countries.