In 1977, the American artist Donald Judd (1928-1994) was faced with a domestic problem: how to provide his two children with private sleeping spaces in the bedroom they had to share? Recently divorced, this renowned visual artist left New York to rent a four-room house in Marfa, a small dusty town in Texas, in the heart of the Chihuahuan Desert. We then find in this deep America only “fake antiques or tubular kitchen furniture with plastic surfaces printed with crazy geometric and floral designs,” he wrote in an article entitled It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp (“It’s hard to find a good lamp”, 1993).
As an amateur cabinetmaker, Donald Judd nails standard boards sold by the local sawmill to create a sleeping platform divided by a vertical partition. Flavin and Rainer, his son and daughter, sleep on either side. “I really liked the bed, he continues in the same textand indeed the whole house, for which I made other furniture using the same construction method. »
The fundamentals of Donald Judd furniture are already present in this children’s bed: simple form, clear function, construction ” honest “, without frills. “Judd doesn’t cover the material, develops art historian Sandra Delacourt, professor at the Ecole supérieure d’art et de design de Tours. He uses Douglas pine, a species abundant in North America, whose veins and knots he lets us see. »
An old black-and-white photograph of the children’s bedroom in Marfa also reveals his attention to integrating furniture into the space. “The bed is not placed in the center of the room, but aligned with the window, providing each child with equal space for contemplation,” notes Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the design curator of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, who finds this detail “Very moving. » More than furniture, Donald Judd strives to create environments where objects organize the experience.
A trendy aesthetic
Considered the major figure of the minimalist movement, Donald Judd left his mark on the history of art through his practice of serial sculpture, theorized in 1964 in his article “Specific Objects”, published in 1965 in Arts Yearbook. Rejecting the word “sculpture”, this manifesto advocated a form of art ” autonomous “, or objects designed to interact with space, without seeking to represent anything other than themselves. As the big book with the purple cover reminds us Donald Judd Furniture (ed. Mack) which the Judd Foundation has just published, the artist was also a prolific designer, who left a lasting imprint on the world around us.
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