The Marfa Chronicle

On an Artist’s Journey to Texas

South room, East building, La Mansana de Chinati/The Block, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Photo©Elizabeth Felicella. Courtesy Judd Foundation. Donald Judd Art©Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I am not sure what motivated my friend Susan and me to choose Marfa, TX, as the destination for a midweek fall mini-vacation, but the storied art town near the state’s southwestern border with Mexico proved a seductive mecca for an artist and an art journalist. Some may know it as the setting for Chris Kraus’s brash epistolary novel I Love Dick, and the Amazon Prime series of the same name (wherein one character describes it as “a small quirky place . . . a combination of blue-collar desert town and folksy artistic retreat”). For art lovers, though, it is the town that Donald Judd made famous between 1971 and his death in 1994, buying up some 32,000 acres of nearby real estate and converting numerous buildings into enormous galleries both for his work and for the art of a select few of his contemporaries, like John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin.

Judd came of age in the late 1950s, when the angsty Abstract Expressionist movement was still a dominant force in the New York art scene. His earliest works were a kind of woozy biomorphism, but he soon turned to a more rigorous aesthetic, becoming the high priest of the fledgling Minimalist movement. He was almost as famous for his writings as for his art, spreading his philosophy in a wide range of magazines, and most notably summing it all up in a doctrine called “Specific Objects” (1965), which advocated for a new kind of anti-illusionistic art distinct from traditional painting and sculpture.

His own work eschewed traditional materials and tended toward boxy, hard-edged shapes painted in a limited range of colors. At their best, they engage with the space around them, offering an elated experience of geometric overload. His colossal “stacks,” some as high as 20 feet, present a kind of glowing monumentality that calls to mind the best of the Minimalist impulses, like Maya Lin’s majestic monument to the Vietnam War. At their most negligible, the shapes and materials are simply pedestrian: early plywood sculptures were mistaken for packing crates and removed from the gallery by a janitor.

I had visited Marfa twice before, more than a decade ago, but had never taken part in the official tours offered by the Judd Foundation. I’d forgotten what a tedious car trip this is from our homes in Taos, NM — it can be done in about eight and a half hours but took us 10 because of my faulty navigation. Once you’re out of northern New Mexico on US 285, the landscape turns endlessly dry and desolate until you reach the ghostly shapes of the Davis and Chinati mountain ranges about an hour outside Marfa.

We rolled into town around 8 p.m. and found our lodgings easily enough, at the Lincoln Hotel off the main drag. Susan had researched accommodations, since we required pet-friendly rooms in deference to her Siamese cat, Robbie, who was a great little traveler but was nonetheless spooked by new surroundings. The décor might best be described as Texas funk, a heady mix of vintage furniture and camp touches, like a repurposed cattle trough for a bathtub (there was also a perfectly fine stall shower) and an impressive antique wooden sign for the Thunderbird Motel. The kitchen was far better equipped than my own, with high-end pots and pans and a state-of-the-art fridge and microwave. And the beds were wonderfully comfortable.

Because of a glitch in communications with the press office, we couldn’t take a tour promised for the next day, which was just as well since all the driving wiped us out. So we drove around Marfa, taking in landmarks like the stately coral-pink courthouse, and shopping for groceries. In our travels, we encountered about ten ICE agents, none of whom showed much interest in a pair of older white women. Lunch at the highly touted St. George Hotel was a tasteless, expensive disappointment, and we returned to our rooms for a nap followed by pizza dinner and several episodes of The Twilight Zone.

The next day we joined a group of about 15 for the first official tour offered by the Judd Foundation, which starts with his library and three main studios in repurposed brick-clad Army buildings, once used for storage and described by our guide as “looking like a junkyard” when Judd first visited Marfa in the early 1970s. The library, encompassing some 13,000 volumes on simple wooden shelves, shows an impressive array of interests, from philosophers in the Socratic tradition to Wittgenstein to monographs about artists from every era to novelists like Gore Vidal and Henry Green.

The first gallery we see in a soaring space about the size of a hanger for small airplanes contains Judd’s output from 1962 to ’66, which feature repetitive shapes in a limited range of colors like purple, red, gray, black, and green. There is a bed off to one side and our guide informs us that Judd liked to visit this gallery to contemplate his earlier works (I don’t dare assay the opinion that perhaps he needed to snooze now and then).

Another gallery offers three of the monumental “stacks” described above. Critic and artist David Salle offers this verdict: “Perhaps the most iconic of Judd’s works from the mid-1960s are the many variations of ‘stacked boxes,’ which fuse the rhythmic progression of Brancusi’s endless column with the aesthetic of a high school shop class.” He adds: “From a purely formal perspective, there had never been anything like them — the way they protrude into the room and hug the wall at the same time.”

The spaces are not all about art, though. At intervals between Judd’s big galleries are enchanting small gardens filled with local flora and cactuses. And the morning ends with a glimpse of the master’s living spaces, including a large homey kitchen with Native American artifacts and pottery designed by Judd. A dining room holds a Judd-designed table and chairs, which recall the simplified designs of early American Shakers. Judd’s pronouncements about the practical side of his endeavors gives a flavor of his no-frills, somewhat bombastic literary style:

The configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. The intent of art is different from that of the latter, which must be functional. If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous. The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair. . . . A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself.

In the afternoon, the tour begins with Judd’s working studio from the 1960s through the ’80s, another cavernous space that occupies a former grocery store, filled with long tables whose surfaces support tools used by the artist and his assistants — Pantone color charts, pens and pencils, measuring instruments like folding yardsticks, and what the guide describes as “unrealized plans because of his sudden death” (from lymphoma). Along the walls are multicolored, almost playful shelf-like sculptures that look like they’d be right at home in a kindergarten; these seem a rare moment of levity in the Judd oeuvre.

Also on the tour are the Cobb House and Whyte Building, two former residential structures that Judd repurposed to hold his early paintings and collection of furnishings made by the Shakers and Viennese Modernist Rudolph Schindler (not that Schindler, of Spielberg fame, but a pioneering designer whose aims for Gesamkunstwerke, or complete works of art integrating a similar philosophy, clearly aligns with Judd’s own). There is also yet another bed on the premises — Susan says she counted at least three altogether.

As for Judd’s paintings from the late 1950s and early ’60s, I am surprised he chose to display these. With the exception of a couple of large works that show his experiments with surface texture and his increasing drift further toward “objecthood,” these look like the work of a talented student, vaguely imitative of painterly expressionist artists like Arshile Gorky and Herman Cherry from the 1940s and ’50s.

We left Judd country with mixed emotions and many questions. How did he finance this massive art town in the desert? (Short answer: flipping real estate, commissions from his designs, and revenues from his own art, as by 1980 he was certifiably a star on an international level.) What kind of personality is behind this Miniminalist extravaganza (and is that an oxymoron)? Susan came away with negative vibes, saying the egomania seemed on a scale with Walt Disney’s. “If I had to sit in one of the rooms he created, I think it would be a very cold experience, almost threatening in a non-human way,” she wrote to me later. “Did he really think his rooms were for contemplation? What kind of contemplation? All the hard uninviting furniture, a little like prison furniture, pushed an aesthetic of punishment. . . .”

There’s also the question of Judd’s lasting influence on younger artists, and I would posit that it’s been almost negligible, judging from what gets attention in the art press these days. The last 20 years or so have seen a broad DEI movement, an interest in traditions outside the mainstream gallery world, and Judd’s quest for an elemental language, a stripped-down attitude, no longer seems of interest (check out the pages of Octobers’s Vanity Fair, for instance, for a look at what younger artists are up to — it’s all over the map, but I see scant influence from the heyday of Minimalism).

Nonetheless, I’m deeply admiring of the way Judd took over a dusty little town and turned it into an art hub, a sprawling, multi-acre “museum,” and I’d like to go back to check out the newly re-opened architecture office and the galleries devoted to Flavin and Chamberlain.

But not for a while. It’s a very, very long trip.

Ann Landi has been an art journalist/critic for the last three decades (The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews) and has recently turned to fiction. East Coast born and raised, she now lives in Taos, New Mexico, where she publishes a weekly Substack newsletter for artists, Vasari21Redux.