Louisa Guinness Gallery



Donald Judd Furniture

Donald Judd began making furniture in 1973, when he moved from New York to Marfa, a ‘one horse’ town in Texas. The reason was practical, as he couldn’t find anything suitable locally – the first pieces he executed were beds for his children. The early furniture was executed with plain planks of pine. ‘I figured it out so I could tell the lumberyard what I wanted – four pieces, five feet long, three pieces, two feet long – and they would cut them for me. They wouldn’t do too many and they wouldn’t do anything fancy. They would just chop it up. For a long time the basic module was the width of the wood: 1x12s, 2x12s. For some racket of the lumberyards, the twelve inches were really eleven inches. Most of the new work is in metric measurement. “
	Early furniture was made of rough pine but Judd continually refined the construction. Later he worked in sheet metal. The wooden pieces are all still made by one fabricator who worked with Judd and made the furniture to his specification. There are six colours of ply and many different types of wood available. The metal is made of aluminium with a choice of 20 different coloured enamels. Some pieces also come in copper which is particularly spectacular.
Judd was very insistent that his furniture should not be seen as artist’s furniture but as real furniture. ‘I’m very touchy about it being considered art. To me the chairs and benches are perfectly comfortable, not hard and uncomfortable as people sometimes seem to think they are. I have nineteenth-century wooden chairs from Sweden and I’ve sat on them for years. I think the thing to do is to either sit up or lie down or stand up: I’m not sympathetic to in-between positions.”