Donald Judd was one of the leading figures of Minimalism, a movement of the 1960s concerned with serial geometric abstraction. Untitled is a wall relief that belongs to a group of horizontal "progressions" that Judd produced beginning in 1964. Fabricated of industrial metals at Bernstein Brothers in Queens, New York, the work consists of a long, hollow brass bar open at both ends. Below the bar is a sequence of five closed steel boxes painted in Judd's signature pigment, cadmium red light. Judd arranged the row of boxes into a mathematical system of solids and voids. Read from right to left, the solid forms double in size, until the final one is sixteen times the size of the original unit. The voids also double, in the reverse direction, until they are four times the size of the first negative space.
Judd believed, however, that the specific system of proportions used was less important than the fact that he was employing an a priori system. By applying a preexisting formula, and by having the work fabricated in an industrial shop, he strove to eliminate any sign of authorship or subjectivity. Judd wanted the viewer to focus on the thing itself-its clean, streamlined, sharp forms, the repetition of "one thing after another."
[T]he idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
-Writer Susan Sontag, 1964
