“It’s impossible to go to the store and buy a chair,” wrote Donald Judd in his 1993 essay “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp”. This is, of course, nonsense. What he really meant was that “it’s impossible to go to the store and buy a chair that would look right in the world I have created for myself”.
The artist, usually described as a minimalist though he himself abhorred the label, wrote later in that same essay about how he had once been asked to design a coffee table and so took one of his familiar, boxy sculptures and attempted to turn it into a functional object. “This debased the work and produced a bad table,” he wrote, “which I later threw away.”
“The configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture,” he wrote. “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.”
Judd was facing two particular issues. The first was how to fill the enormous industrial structures he was slowly accumulating as homes, workspaces and galleries. The second was his concern with distinguishing art from design.
The first issue came about because Judd was one of the pioneers of the SoHo loft scene, acquiring, in 1968, 101 Spring Street, the beautiful cast-iron industrial building that is now open to the public. The big spaces, the industrial finishes and his own rigorous sensibilities made furnishing a particular problem.
The first piece of furniture Judd designed for the loft was a bed, consisting of a few thick planks to make a very basic platform. The mattress sat on top and the broad, protruding timber edges housed electricity points for lamps and a phone (very contemporary, that, addressing the need for charging in the middle of a capacious floor). A famous photo shows his wife, the dancer and choreographer Julie Finch, on the bed, surrounded by a mess of books and bottles.
After that Judd moved on to designing chairs, tables, more conventional beds, stools and shelves in myriad combinations, beautifully catalogued in a new book Donald Judd Furniture (published by Judd Foundation and MACK), much of which is still commercially available from the Judd Foundation.
Just recently, Judd’s furniture became news when the Foundation sued Kim Kardashian’s interior designers for infringement of copyright and trademark, false advertising, and unfair competition. Conducting a video tour around her new studio for her skincare brand SKKN, Kardashian waves her arms at the table and says “These Donald Judd tables are really amazing . . .” But it turns out they were very much not Donald Judd, rather they were inspired by the artist and knocked up by her designers. The Judd Foundation is not keen on this kind of thing.
The table in question was the La Mansana Table 22, a large, brutally simple piece, made using simple planks. It was designed for the former military buildings in downtown Marfa, deep in the Texas desert; the largest repository of Judd’s furniture.
Judd used to sometimes install beds in his exhibitions, to allow viewers to relax with the work. But his furniture designs were, mostly, uncomfortable. When his wife Julie bought a baggy brown corduroy sofa from Bloomingdale’s for their vast loft, his daughter later suggested their marriage did not survive it. Instead Judd’s furniture is boxy, square and uncompromising, very much, in fact, like his art. Yet he saw the two things as utterly different worlds. “A work of art exists as itself,” he wrote. “A chair exists as a chair itself. And the idea of a chair isn’t a chair.”
That debate, so alive in the 1960s and 1970s, that concern with distinctions between disciplines, has since almost entirely broken down. The Modernists have waned. Does the difference between sculpture and furniture really matter any more? Go to an upmarket art fair and you will see modern works framed by mid-century Danish teak sideboards or sculptures atop furniture by Le Corbusier or Charlotte Perriand. You will find pieces of Jean Prouvé buildings being sold as sculpture and impractical tables by Zaha Hadid.
These things now coexist quite comfortably in the same world of luxury consumption. Arguably, they did for Judd as well — his classic 20th-century chairs are displayed there alongside works by his friends Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg and others. The chairs look like art.
I’d argue that Judd’s furniture is art, much as he, and the Foundation, might disagree. His chairs are exquisitely sculptural objects (Judd, incidentally, refused to call his artworks sculpture). They are as much about the space underneath as the form; this usually neglected under-seat space is treated in a variety of ways, with angled planes or shelves or cubes, informed by his art, which imparts a kind of charisma to them, objects playing sophisticated spatial games.
The Judd Foundation is sometimes criticised for the prices of these pieces; Kim Kardashian’s table, if genuine, would have cost $90,000, the chairs around $9,000 each. But Judd’s work was always meticulously made and, consequently, expensive (he writes about the impossibility of bringing the prices down through mass manufacture in a concise critique of capitalism). The proceeds also help to run the sprawling and much-admired buildings and galleries; an expensive and very worthwhile business.
But look at the prices of his furniture pieces (they hold their value and more, selling for many thousands of dollars) and then look at the price of a Judd artwork; a good piece might go for $5mn-$10mn. The chairs are a bargain.
“The furniture is comfortable to me,” he wrote. “Rather than making a chair to sleep in or a machine to live in, it is better to make a bed. A straight chair is best for eating or writing. The third position is standing.”
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
This article has been amended to include full details of the lawsuit against Kim Kardashian’s interior designers
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