"Throughout his career, Donald Judd believed that art could only express what lay within the realm of empirical knowledge. His conviction that art must confine itself to "what I know" motivated his formal decisions. It was this philosophy that generated the landmark sculpture Judd began to produce in the early 1960s. These reductive, geometric pieces came to epitomize the new American art. Yet he gradually moved beyond the confines of this Minimalist style to create a varied and lyric vocabulary. Judd has demonstrated that an art based on consistent principles need not stagnate in repetitions of the past nor succumb to the superficiality of rapidly changing trends. From his early geometric arrangements to this large-scale, on-site installations in Marfa, Texas, Judd's work stands as a testament to the richness of aesthetic invention that can emerge from within a strict set of self-imposed limitations. This book accompanied the Judd retrospective organized at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Barbara Haskell, Curator, Painting and Sculpture. Haskell's essay, illustrated with 51 color and 64 black-and-white reproductions, reveals how Judd's disciplined conception of art altered the visual vocabulary of his age." --… (more)