Quotes by Donald Judd

• Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.
• 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.
• 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.
• There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for.
• They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.
• 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.
• 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.
• Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.
• 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.
• Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.
• Well, its very exasperating when you can't get it right.
• Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.
• I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once.
• 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.
• And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.
• Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.
• After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.
• Pollock looks unusual and radical even now.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I haven't sufficient interest in objects or anything I can see around me to do what Oldenburg does.
• I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.
• 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.
• I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality.
• 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.