Material, space, and color are the main aspects of visual art.
Everyone knows that there is material that can be picked
up and sold, but no one sees space and color. Two of the main
aspects of art are invisible; the basic nature of art is invisible.
The integrity of visual art is not seen. The unseen nature and
integrity of art, the development of its aspects, the irreducibility
of thought can be replaced by falsications, and by verbiage
about the material, itself in reality unseen. The discussion of
science is scientic; the discussion of art is superstitious.
There is no history.
There has been some discussion of space, usually of propor-
tion, by past architects, and some by historians of architecture.
There is some by recent architects: practical by Alexander,
practical and actual by Kahn, a little by Van Doesburg, by Mies
van der Rohe, by Le Corbusier, and by Wright. There is some
in Japanese and Korean literature, mixed with an astrology
of place, called “pungsu” in Korean and “feng shui” in Chinese,
both meaning “wind and water,” classed vaguely in English as
“geomancy.” But the subject of space in architecture, the nature
of architecture, is not developed. Judging from the evidence
of the buildings by recent well-known architects, space in
architecture is no longer known. It’s not unseen; it’s not there.
Within the clothes there is no Emperor.
There has been almost no discussion of space in art, nor
in the present. The most important and developed aspect of
present art is unknown. This concern, my main concern, has
no history. There is no context; there are no terms; there are
not any theories. There is only the visible work invisible. Space
is made by an artist or architect; it is not found and packaged.
It is made by thought. Therefore most buildings have no space.
Most people are not aware of this absence. They are not both-
ered by a confusion and a nothingness that is enclosed. Of
course they don’t miss real space and don’t desire it. Sometimes
when they are traveling they enter a cathedral, recognize
space, and thank God instead of the architect. Some people
recognize and want what they never knew existed. A few
people have said to me, and one has written, that my work
together made space of a room, made architecture, and
even that it made a “spiritual” space. Space is so unknown
that the only comparison is to the beliefs of the past.
After a few thousand years space is so unknown that a
discussion of it would have to begin with a rock. How large is
it ? Is it on a level surface ? Does it rest on the surface or does it
perch ? If it isn’t on a level surface, the tilted surface approaches
a second entity. Is the rock symmetrical ? If not, does it face
away or toward the tilted surface ? Is the top of the rock pointed,
rounded, at but symmetrical with the sides, at but broader
than the sides, so that the rock is a thick plane parallel to the
surface, level or tilted ? That is, in general, in what way does the
rock create space around itself ? It is a denition of space, a
center of space, in one way a core of space. I’m not interested
in skinny gures, but they are Giacometti’s early and unusual
creation of space. A related creation made earlier and by many
architects is the scheme of the old Russian churches. The base,
the church itself, is a hollow block, which is a form so far
in advance of this discussion that I will never get to it. The top
of the church, a single onion dome if the church is small,
or one large dome and four smaller ones if the church is large,
is like the pointed rock, but of course is denite, a core of
space in the sky, developing from the solidly enclosed space
below, contracting above the roof, swelling into a light volume
and contracting to a point. The Kimbell Art Museum is like
the rock on a tilted surface. It is at the foot of a long slope and
instead of facing ahead in continuation of the slope, as is
expected, it faces the slope, which becomes a secondary, half-
dened space. In exception to the meager discussion of space
Michael Benedikt describes the slope toward the Kimbell
and relates it to geomancy.
Then, what if a second rock is placed nearby ? I’m not
describing how a primitive discussion of space began thousands
of years ago, but how a primitive discussion might begin
tomorrow, if this civilization were advanced enough to bear it.
How far apart are the two rocks ? Is one larger than the other ?
Two rocks of equal size and the space between them is a situa-
tion which is very dierent from that of a small rock and a
large rock with the same space between. Do the rocks have the
same shape or is one pointed and the other round ? If they are
on a slope, which is higher, which joins the plane as an entity ?
If two objects are close together they dene the space in
between. These denitions are innite until the two objects
are so far apart that the distance in between is no longer space.
But then the passerby remembers that one was there and
another here. The space between can even be more denite
than the two objects which establish it; it can be a single space
more than the two objects are a pair. Of course I can’t con-
tinue, I can’t mention what would happen if a stick were put
across the two stones. Over two hundred years ago Samuel
Johnson kicked a rock to prove its existence; fty years ago
Wallace Stevens described the eect of a jar upon the wilder-
ness; this year there are two rocks; obviously this leisurely pace
is too fast.
In this century, since the decline before its beginning of
the traditional art of the diverse civilizations, within the subse-
quent art meant to be international, the development of space
is only thirty years old. Until then an interest in space was
not one of the main characteristics of international contem-
porary art. This was of course because the great change at
the turn of the century occurred conservatively in painting.
The contradictions of simulated space were primary. All
sculpture, except for Giacometti’s, before and including David
Smith’s – that of Rodin and Maillol, and Brancusi and Arp,
both of whose work I like better than Giacometti’s – is tradi-
tional sculpture, which is primarily one rock with complications,
or is low relief, one plane with complications. However, a new
aspect begins in the work of Brancusi and Arp, which is that
of the work as a whole. Art does not change in one line, not
from A to B to C, but from V to to L. But it does change;
it has to change, unless science becomes immobilized into
religion. I was not completely alone in the early s in
developing space as a main aspect of art, but few artists were
interested and then usually within an earlier context, the
imagery in Bontecou’s work and the remnants of Smith’s,
the standing position and the compositional elements in
Chamberlain’s work. Later the interest in three-dimensionality
and in space developed quickly, all kinds, a little, a lot. The
most developed were the canvas works by Oldenburg,
enclosing a soft space, a exible space, and the glass works by
Larry Bell, which contained a visible space, modied by a
phenomenological aspect that has become an important new
aspect, which Dan Flavin began somewhat earlier and Bob
Irwin somewhat later. This aspect was begun by Pollock in his
specic use of color and material. I think that I developed
space as a main aspect of art. This aspect is now widespread at
a low level, which wouldn’t matter much if anyone mentioned
that, and is the primary aspect in the work of the few very
good younger artists, who, since space is invisible, are insu-
ciently recognized. Space is now a main aspect of present art,
comparable only to color as a force. The other artist who
has thoroughly developed space is of course Richard Serra.
The development of space is within the last thirty years.
For one hundred years the most powerful aspect has been
color. The one hundred years of the primacy of color is still
only a beginning. Basically the present international art devel-
oped from the traditional representational art of Europe.
The necessities of representation inhibited the use of color.
An object is pale in the light and dark in the shade, allowing
full color only in between, usually in smaller areas than the
light and shade and usually well back from the frontal plane
of the picture, to where the full color is subdued by aerial
perspective. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese painting is also
representational, but without the simulation of unied space,
and is usually subdued to depict space. Japanese prints are an
important exception to the attrition of color, as well as paint-
ings on screens and the illustration of novels, all at and bright.
Goya said: “In art there is no need for color; I see only light
and shade.” The simulation of appearance, the depiction of
objects in their space, upon a at surface, a simulation of reality
that must be believed by the painter and is intended to be
believed by the viewer, is not compatible with a developed
interest in color. The painting by Zeuxis that the birds pecked
at could not have been like the painting on Attic vases, at
areas of red and black. It had to be a better version of the
kind of depiction in the frescoes of Pompeii. The red and black
of the vase painting is color; the color in the frescoes is an
accompaniment. Romanesque painting, which has clear and
strong and well-organized areas of color, has always been safe
from birds. I can imagine a Romanesque painter being horri-
ed by Cimabue’s modulation into representation of the areas
of color. Since the painter represented the universe, he must
have thought it decadent (at the beginning of the Renaissance)
to represent an individual. The areas of color in Giotto’s paint-
ings are due to the past and are more important than the newly
modeled faces, feet, and hands. Despite the high quality of
the subsequent painting, color was a declining interest. But it is
too particular and especially too important in organization to
become minor, just secondary.
The discussion of space has been leisurely, like the explora-
tion in Marvell’s poem, or like the lawsuit over who owned
the snow on Popocatépetl, which took two hundred years,
while the knowledge of space which I’ve made grew swiftly.
This is a great deal of knowledge, but not written, knowledge
of a peculiar kind as visual art, made by a person, sometimes
intelligible to other persons, not made by snakes or owls,
probably not intelligible to intelligent beings elsewhere, per-
haps not to our descendants in ten thousand years. The work is
a great deal of knowledge about space, which is necessarily
related to the space of architecture. This knowledge is, to
me, particular and plentifully diverse; to almost everyone it
doesn’t exist; it’s invisible.
I feel that I have the steam engine, but no tracks, or
the gasoline engine, but no wheels. The Mexicans invented
the wheel for toys but never thought to use the idea for
transportation. Plenty of good ideas in so-called early civiliza-
tions were never developed. Civilizations, like art, do not
change in a line; it’s best to avoid the word “progress.” Good
ideas that were developed are now ignored in the industrial
transition, such as the knowledge of space in traditional
Korean and Japanese architecture or the knowledge of urban
space in eighteenth-century European cities and nineteenth-
century Paris. None of this quantity of knowledge, built, not
written, is used in new construction. Seoul and Osaka are
wastelands in which there are monuments and Paris is a curi-
osity surrounded by a desert. The earlier knowledge isn’t
regarded as knowledge, but as appearance, as style, and so
cannot continue, cannot accumulate, as scientic knowledge
does. There are books with plans about earlier architecture
and cities but these plans are regarded as only history and not
as relevant. There is no discussion of space in art and architec-
ture in the present.
In I made a right angle of wood placed directly on
the oor. This was preceded by another freely placed work,
and that by a work which I considered then to be high relief,
but which I consider now to be the rst three-dimensional
work to be on the wall. For a long time it was on the oor.
The size of the right angle is determined by the right angle of
a black pipe, whose two open ends are the centers of the outer
planes of the right angle, which is painted cadmium red light;
red and black, and black as space. The right angle doesn’t stand
or sit and although it is vertical, centimeters high, there is
no way to believe it to be an abstracted gure, or an abstracted
object. All sides are equal. There is scarcely an inside and
an outside, only the space within the angle and the space
beyond the angle. The only enclosed space is inside the pipe.
This slight linear space determines the dimensions of the
broad planes. The shell of this narrow space passes through
the breadth of the inner angle, a denite space through a
general space.
Before the right angle and its predecessor, all “sculpture”
was placed on a pedestal or, nally, in David Smith’s work,
stood like a gure. Nothing had ever been placed directly on
the oor. As I’ve written before, I think there was a small at
work on the oor by Lucas Samaras done at the same time or
earlier. Since now it is common for work to be placed any-
where in a room, it is impossible for people to understand that
placement on the oor and the absence of a pedestal were
inventions. I invented them. But there is no history.
One of the many destructive assumptions now is that
all ideas have no originators; they are mutations in the public
domain. The use and meaning of the ideas are vague. But
someone invents ideas. Someone wants something new. In its
invention an idea is clear and in its diusion it is vague. This is
easy to see. It’s easy to see that Chamberlain invented Stella’s
reliefs. A new idea is quickly debased, often before the origina-
tor has time and money to continue it. In general I think this
has happened to all of my work, but especially to the use
of the whole room, which is now called an installation, which
basically I began. Oldenburg’s Store was a store but it could be
called an installation. Bob Whitman’s performances occurred
in installations. Several years later Yayoi Kusama made a free-
standing room and Lucas Samaras also. In in Los Angeles
a work of Carl Andre’s, 8 Cuts, covered the oor of the gallery.
Of course in Lissitzky built the Proun Room and in the
late s Schwitters built the Merzbau. One work occupying
a whole room is still alive and new in the work of a few
artists – Roni Horn, Mikail Schulz, Ilya Kabakov – but many
artists degrade the idea, for example Barbara Kruger, who is
my favorite, because she also degrades red and black. Again
there is no discussion and criticism of works which occupy
rooms, which is a reason why it is possible to have bland
and trite work, with one or two meager and obvious ideas
spread over a whole room, usually in writing, without space,
which is after all the origin of the form.
My work with the whole room began with part of it. In
I made a work that extended from the oor to the ceiling.
This extended the denite space between the units to those
below and above. In I made six galvanized iron units
which extended from wall to wall, so that the corners became
denite and the whole end of the room articulated. In
there was an anodized aluminum work, now destroyed, which
was on the oor and against the wall, also wall to wall. And in
the same year a work made of cold-rolled steel, now destroyed,
with eleven units which extended from corner to corner the
length of the room. Also in that year I made a work of many
galvanized iron units which occupied about a third of an
otherwise empty room, a work in relation to the whole room.
This is now in Texas. In I made what is usually described
as a galvanized iron wall which went around three sides of a
room. This is a whole room. It’s in Texas. In Portland in
we built a very large voluminous plywood work around three
sides of the space.
In very little that was traditionally three-dimensional
was placed on the wall, only the low reliefs by Arp, which
are better than usually thought. None of the large reliefs
by Schwitters were in New York City. Later, Oldenburg made
low reliefs of plaster for his Store and later Bontecou made
high reliefs and later again Chamberlain made high reliefs. No
one is interested in this sequence of development, as no one
is interested in the development of a whole room as one work.
Art historians of the past are at least interested in chronology.
Art historians of the present are not. It’s too real and interferes
with treating the present as the past, but with less substance,
a subject of their speculation.
Low and high relief are basically painting, possessing the
same problems, as well as some of their own. After I made the
rst works placed on the oor, knowing the new relationship
to a surface, through at least , I didn’t think anything could
be made which could be placed on the wall. Then I realized
that the relationship to the wall could be the same as that to
the oor. The work on the oor was not lying at upon it,
therefore it was not low relief on the oor, nor heaped upon
it, therefore it was not high relief on the oor. This discussion
seems long but it’s brief. Most relationships and exceptions
can’t be mentioned, but one exception is that I don’t consider
Carl Andre’s works on the oor to be low relief, regardless
of being at. My work on the oor was a new form, creating
space amply and strongly. The relationship could be the same
to the wall. It was necessary for the work to project suciently,
at least as much as its height and width. I never made this
minimum, which would be a cube. The rst such work, in
, was horizontal, made of leftover plywood semicircles,
and it projected further than its height. The same year a small
work that projects was constructed by a nearby factory. In ,
the factory made, then and now a condemnation to hell, a
vertical work of ten units, each short in relation to its depth,
all together long, and, as I said, with spaces equal to those
between the units at the oor and at the ceiling, with luck.
The necessary dierence was that the work not be attened,
low or high, to the wall, whether it be small or large. This
invention is still not understood, or rather it is completely lost.
Derivations are everywhere, but are always low or high relief,
new in appearance only. The small and medium-sized works
on the wall have been those in which it has been most possible
to develop color.
The discussion of color is greater than the discussion of
space, and unlike the missing particularities of space, it describes
to redundancy the particularities of color. Primarily this has
been because with the creation of science in the seventeenth
century the study of color has been part of science. And like
astronomy it has been cursed with its own astrology. The
discussion of color has not been leisurely, like that of space.
Instead of millennia, the speed has been in generations. There
is a history of color, rst in philosophy and then in science.
Aristotle said that there was in the category of substance an
entity which might have an aspect of the category of quality:
material was primary, color was secondary. He also said, to
quote Copleston, that “matter is at once the principle of indi-
viduation and unknowable in itself.” There is a history of
color in art. Every other generation has a new idea of color.
However, this is a generation without ideas. At the present
space and color have in common complete neglect. Despite
the primary importance of color for more than a hundred
years there are now no theories. The last philosophy of
color, which is what it was, as well as being factual, and the
mixture may be unavoidable, at least in art, was that of Josef
Albers in Interaction of Color of . In Part , Albers begins:
If one says “Red” (the name of a color)
and there are people listening,
it can be expected that there will be reds in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these reds will be very dierent.
That is a philosophy and it does not agree with what Albers
was taught in the Bauhaus.
I knew as a child that certain colors were supposed to
produce certain feelings. I didn’t understand why a bull should
be mad at red. Johannes Itten and Kandinsky taught in their
important color courses at the Bauhaus that colors always
produce the same emotions, and also that colors always corre-
spond to certain shapes, the two together agreeing on the
emotion. The idea that I like best is Kandinsky’s that a pentagon
combines a square, which is red, with triangles, which are
yellow, to make orange. The idea should be sent to Washington
so that the newly painted Pentagon could be the rst to use
color in war. The square is death; the triangle is vehemence.
The circle is blue and is innite and peaceful. As with God
and patriotism, I didn’t take the attributions of color seriously
enough to contemplate. I don’t remember such ideas being
discussed in the s or after. In contrast, the terms “warm”
and “cool” are still used as description, but also as thermometers
of feeling. The more vague an idea, the longer it lasts; in decay
it becomes even more vague and lasting.
A basic problem for an artist at the beginning is that while
color is crucial in their work, its development being a force,
the information about color is extensive and occurs in many
forms, partly technical and partly philosophical. The technical
information is irrelevant and uninteresting until it is needed.
The philosophy seldom ts. There is a limit to how much
an artist can learn in advance. An artist works only step by
step into the unknown while the particular knowledge of
color exists and is vast; the particulars of the world are innite.
This is overwhelming in an urgent situation. Color is very
hard to learn, since it is hard to know what is useful. The
particulars must be the artist’s own. Nevertheless, color should
be taught to the beginning artist, rst, as knowledge which
may be relevant; second, as knowledge of the history of art,
which is the history of the activity and of the history of color
in that activity; and third, as day-to-day new knowledge for
the new artist, who should only be taught from the beginning
as an artist. That help should be step by step as it is needed in
a completely individual eort. This sounds obvious but few
understand how much of a process it is to make art. It is very
much building, as I said, step by step. These remarks about
art education seem innocuous but they imply a revolution.
For example, no one but a daily, actual, working artist of
some worldly standing, as things are now, should teach art.
Otherwise it’s like a non-plumber teaching plumbing. No one
but someone who is beginning as an artist should be taught.
Why learn to plumb, if you’re not going to ?
Artists cannot teach the history of their activity. They sel-
dom can teach the activity of their own activity. They have no
connections with those interested in art and with the public.
They cannot explain their activity. This is part of what is wrong.
This is partly why the integrity of art is steadily less. There
cannot be an education of artists that is distant, distorted, and
institutionalized with the expectation that in ve or ten years
a good artist will result. The result is another institutionalized
new teacher.
The last real picture of real objects in a real world was
painted by Courbet. After that no one was so sure about the
real world, so that when it came to keeping a color or an
undescriptive shape at the cost of accurate representation, the
latter lost. From Manet onward the concerns of painting itself
developed quickly. This is the conventional history of recent
painting. Nothing like this happened in sculpture, since being
in space there was no conict, and there was no color. It was
conservative and was not bothered by the problem of how
the world is known. The trouble and cost of its making had to
have been a factor. The history of the increasing emphasis on
the means of painting is very large and detailed. More than the
so-called form, or the shapes, color is the most powerful force.
In retrospect, and only so, the expansion of color is logical
until the s, concluding with the painting of Pollock,
Newman, Still, and Rothko. The need for color, the meaning
of that need, more than anything, destroyed the earlier repre-
sentational painting, whether in Europe or Asia. In the work
of all of the well-known painters, color is amplied beyond
anything seen for centuries, even in the work of Munch, whose
work is not considered abstract. In the work of most – Matisse,
Mondrian, Malevich, Léger, the four just mentioned – color
is the dominant aspect, as black-and-white photographs show.
Color is an immediate sensation, a phenomenon, and in that
leads to the work of Flavin, Bell, and Irwin.
All experience is knowledge: subjective experience is
knowledge; objective experience, which is science, is obviously
knowledge. Color is knowledge. As Albers says, it is very sub-
jective, even hard to remember. Color is also objective. In Part
Albers says to paste a red circle and a white circle on a
black sheet of paper and then stare at the red circle. Then, look
at the white circle: it is green or blue green, the complemen-
tary of red. Allowing for everything human being subjective,
this is absolutely objective. Color as knowledge is very durable.
I nd it dicult, maybe impossible, to forget. A considerable
eort in the painted sheet aluminum work that I made was
to forget the colors and their combinations that I had liked
and used in my rst paintings, those in turn sometimes derived
from Mondrian, Léger, or Matisse, or earlier European painters.
Newman of course faced this denition and durability when
he painted the four paintings he called Who’s Afraid of Red,
Yellow and Blue. He didn’t go so far as to challenge red, yellow,
blue, and white. Mondrian’s colors are one of the facts and
wonders of the world; there aren’t seven anymore. Perhaps if
the four colors were equal in extent they would no longer
belong to Mondrian. The preponderance of white to the bright
colors is of course the determining ratio.
It’s a shame to provide arguments in support of museums,
but in I lived in Philadelphia where there is one. In it there
is the left panel, the crucixion, by Rogier van der Weyden.
The colors I remember are blue, not soft, and red, high and
slightly rosy. In my present vocabulary they are similar to
-Farben , Himbeerrot, and -Farben , Kobaltblau.
In art school I used them in a little painting and they remained
Van der Weyden’s. I painted over them. I don’t know where
I saw, perhaps only in books, Gerard David’s light gray and
cobalt blue, which is not . Giorgione’s and Titian’s deep
blue and orange brown is vast and inescapable. El Greco is
interesting of course because he was from Crete, from which
Theophanes earlier went to Russia, and because of the inu-
ence of the Romanesque use of color in large areas. El Greco’s
colors are of one type, often glazed, and match where nothing
is suspected to exist: alizarin crimson, viridian, a clear yellow,
and ultramarine blue. Except for the yellow these are all
dark, but they are all clear, like stained glass. The Philadelphia
Museum of Art also has many paintings by Mondrian. The
rst museum that I loved for art and hated for architecture was
the Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum in Kansas City, which
has one of the best collections of Chinese art. The gray-green
celadon from Korea is another durable color, of course a glaze,
which is another important aspect. Also virtually glazed, but
by oil, is the brown black of the trees and the high green blue
of the sky in Ralph Blakelock’s paintings.
Color in architecture began and ended with De Stijl.
Earlier and later it is decoration or it is the usually quiet colors
of materials. The colors of the bronze and the tinted glass of
the building by Mies van der Rohe in New York City form
as denite a scheme as any with bright colors. The question is
whether architecture should always be quiet, with natural
materials, usually gray or tan, or whether it should always be
brightly colored or partly colored. In the present noisy and
cluttered society, urban and rural, the obvious recommenda-
tion is to avoid color. As seen in bright signs everywhere, color
becomes further junk. But without color, which is almost always
on signs, most cities are junk anyway, the newest the worst.
Within De Stijl, Van Doesburg was by far the most inter-
ested in color in architecture. He wanted a new activity, that of
“colorist,” to apply to architecture, which was always more con-
servative, as in the “collaboration,” as Van Doesburg conceived
it between himself and J. J. P. Oud regarding the De Vonk
holiday residence in and and with Jan Wils regarding
the De Lange house in . But Oud said that Van Doesburg
was not being practical, which meant that the neighbors
would be oended. Van Doesburg designed the interior of
the Café Aubette in Strasbourg from to within
what he then considered a “collective” with Jean Arp, Sophie
Taeuber-Arp, and Paul Horn, as architect, but the owners
modied it to the public’s complaints within two years.
Basically Van Doesburg was applying planes of color, at
an angle, which he thought harmonious and dynamic, to the
orthogonal structure of the architecture, which he thought
ordinary. Aside from the ever discouraging public, this division
could not continue. Color has to be part of the usually right-
angular architecture. So far this has not been done. The use
of color by Rietveld is very nice but does not exceed decora-
tion by much. The work of Luis Barragán is a possibility
but I haven’t seen it and the photographs are more pretty than
informative. Van Doesburg thought of the painted window
frames of De Lange as planes of color moving across the façade.
He was wishful, but this and others are still good ideas.
Mondrian, Malevich, Van Doesburg, and others made or
tried to make art and architecture as part of a new civilization,
which obviously it was, and obviously still is. They are gener-
ally disparaged as being idealistic and utopian, Mondrian’s
philosophy aside. Why is it idealistic – even what does that
mean – to want to do something new and benecial, practical
also, in a new civilization ? Is it practical to let the civilization
become as gross as it is becoming, to let it become stagnant,
and then in a few hundred years try to aerate it ? By then
it will be completely inert, so that nothing can be done and
nothing even imagined to be done. No one will realize that
there isn’t a civilization. As usual the civilization will be con-
vinced of not being one by its collapse. Why should everything
be commercial ? Just existing, even well, is not supposed to be
civilized. And again, what does commercial mean ? That has a
wide range. As I mentioned, Oud argued to Van Doesburg that
he was being practical, that he was building what could be
built in the circumstances, part of which were the neighbors.
This is not practical, but conventional. The judgment of the
neighbors is based upon meager knowledge and is determined
by their narrow time and place and especially by their idea of
status in the society, part of the narrowness, which is the great-
est myth of this time. Anyway, the ignorance of the neighbors
has a wide range, from that of the few rich to the not as rich
to what is now called the middle class in the United States, but
is lower, to those who know only a thousand words and can’t
read, again in the United States. Should art and architecture be
made for a class or for each class ? The neighbors have formed
a taste among themselves, strangely worldwide, which is ex-
ploited by business. A town nearby in West Texas, which has a
well-restored fort, is visited by tourists, who sometimes remain.
These are all of a class and they slowly remake the town into
what their scanty and sentimental knowledge makes them
think a town of the Old West should look like. Should they
be encouraged ? If the knowledge of artists and architects is
discredited, and of science, and only the very slowly growing
knowledge of the great mass, if it grows, narrow class by class,
is to be acted upon, then it will be hundreds of years before a
real civilization develops, if ever, because commerce, in accor-
dance with the neighbors’ taste, will have designed everything
in the world and the people as well. Clinton said recently:
“You have to change the behavior of the whole country.
People have to change their lives.”
Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that a house with a view should
be built below the top of a hill, not on the top, out of the wind,
primarily to be unobtrusive in the landscape. The same advice
applies to color. In new and empty land, in well-cultivated
land, as in Tuscany, and even in suburban land approaching visual
misery, it is wrong to construct obtrusive buildings. Whether
they are obtrusive or not depends on the presence or absence
of trees and on whether the land is at or high. A bright build-
ing in the desert seems a mistake. In the polders perhaps not.
The best argument for brightly colored buildings are those of
Saint Petersburg and Pushkin or Tsarskoye Selo, pink or
turquoise. The white of the old churches in Russia is conspic-
uous in summer, like the large white rabbits without snow
which I once saw in January in the archipelago o Stockholm,
and then the churches are evanescent in winter. The color
is not disagreeable partly because it is on isolated buildings and
partly because it occurs on at land among trees or among
yellow and tan buildings, where it cannot be seen from far
away, except for the Winter Palace. The buildings of the city of
Saint Petersburg improve the land, which is seldom the case.
In Tuscany, the cultivation improves the land, which is also rare.
The yellow ocher and red ocher of the buildings t very well
and the land even tolerates castles on the hilltops. In Korea
an old village is beautiful, with thatched roofs, or with black
tiles on the roofs, and with tiles on the adobe walls, lying
quietly in the land, looking like the land. In both Korea and
Japan the tiles on the roof are often red or blue plastic. In Japan
the traditional high thatched roof is often replaced by the
same shape in colored metal, including the old crosspieces at
the ends of the peak.
In general bright color adds to the bedlam. But then, just as
the continuous noise in some cities, especially New York, is
thoughtless, so is the use of color and materials. It is usual for
a building to have half a dozen materials on the façade or in the
lobby, which is as excruciating as the garbage truck beeping
backward and grinding. What if someone thought about the
color of a building or of the colors of a town or city as a
whole ? But the answer to this question will not arrive. There is
no sign of real color in present architecture, most of it called
“postmodern,” in which, if there is a little more color, it is small
decoration become larger. Color is misused in this architecture,
as is its more or less prefabricated construction, the source
of the style.
Many cities are built within a few years, or areas of cities are
built that are so huge as to be cities themselves, usually built
brutally in regard to the land. In Hong Kong not just a hillside
is bulldozed, as in Los Angeles; it’s the whole hill that is remade.
The scale of everything in East Asia is greater; it’s what New
York must have seemed like in the s. Of course the build-
ings are mindlessly repetitive, relieved by kitsch when there
is money. Along the southern shore of the Han River in Seoul
there must be a hundred huge slabs of apartment buildings,
identical, numbered, probably because it seems exotic, in huge
Arabic numbers. The dwellers must like this. I think it’s hell.
They can’t desire diversity. But this is one of the most impor-
tant and dicult problems in architecture and urban planning.
Diversity was created in small projects in the s and s,
for example that by Paul Frank in Hamburg, built from
to . The greatest diversity built deliberately and at once
that I have seen is the Zeche Zollverein near Essen, built in the
early s. But, like color, diversity disappeared in commer-
cialism, even when the money was public.
Primarily diversity should be produced by the plan of the
streets and buildings, which make the fundamental structure,
which includes the questions of where to live, to work, go
to school, and where to ignore art and music. But secondarily,
not just as decoration, not even as large decoration, not even
as a parallel activity, color should be part of the necessary
diversity. In architecture color is part of architecture; it isn’t
part of art. The integrity of each is damaged by being mixed.
In the Gesamtkunstwerk more is less.
Itten wrote in : “Form is also color. Without color
there is no form. Form and color are one.” It never occurred
to me to make three-dimensional work without color. I took
Itten’s premise, which I had not read, for granted. Sculpture
itself was a distant idea to me; that it be only white or gray was
a notion of the academy. This is why so much of this essay is
about space. Color and space occur together. I consider black,
gray, and white to be color, as Leonardo did, despite, as he
says, philosophers, and despite Mondrian and Van Doesburg.
Aside from the scientic view of light as color and its absence
as the absence of color, which is true of course, it is also true
that the whole range from white through the colors to black
can be seen in light. Color as the spectrum and color as mate-
rial, so to speak, are not the same. Black can be seen in the
light. And also, again, all materials, gray and tan, are colored.
I did not study sculpture; I studied painting and made
paintings until . I liked David Smith’s sculpture but con-
sidered it a very dierent aspect of art. Sculpture in North
America never reached the invention of painting. Even Smith’s
work was somewhat backward, backward even in relation to
the sculpture by Arp, although he was older. Tony Smith’s sup-
posed inuence is an instance of the ignorance of chronology.
The rst work that I saw of his was two four-by-four-by-eight-
foot black boxes which were separate but could be placed
together to form a cube. These were plywood mock-ups for
welded metal. This was in March at the Wadsworth
Atheneum. The work was not interesting and the black con-
tradicted, by making vague, the volume of the work. Before
Smith was known only as a friend of Pollock and Newman
and as an architect on Long Island. The three-dimensional
work that I began in was new and the complete use of
color was new.
While I was making the rst two works and the right angle
I realized that there had been no such work before. I was
puzzled by them, especially the rst, the relief that isn’t a relief.
I had made what I wanted. The paintings were dicult: each
one had aspects that I wanted and aspects that I didn’t, usually
opposed. The three-dimensional work eliminated or solved
the contradictions. For example, the paintings were large rect-
angles of color, usually cadmium red light, with lines, painted
or sometimes incised. The lines, cut or not, were an element
on top of the rectangle, an addition to it, a second lesser element
within the rectangle. The breadth of the colored rectangle
and the narrowness of the lines could never become only one
element, one whole. The right angle and the subsequent
rectangular volumes on the oor, all the same red, were large
planes, more than one, whose edges were denite lines.
Their edges were not the boundaries of one plane on a wall
but were the quiet transition from one plane to another, quiet
but more denite than the boundaries, since it was undeniable
that they were at ninety degrees to each other. The new
work seemed to be the beginning of my own freedom, with
possibilities for a lifetime. The possibilities and the lifetime
are now well along.
The narrow and lazy nature of art criticism makes it di-
cult to know the diversity of my work, or of anyone’s, but if
the list of exhibitions at the back of the catalogue is related to
what the exhibitions contained, the diversity is obvious and
the substantial prior invention proven.
In Julius Meier-Graefe wrote: “The incomprehensi-
bility of painting and sculpture to the general public has
been shrouded in a veil of pretentious exposition.” All of the
works in the many exhibitions were dicult and expensive
to construct. Artists are not supposed to think about money,
but I paid for the work, either directly or nally because an
advance was a debt to the gallery. To construct work in three
dimensions is to be damned to ambivalence within the society.
I had intended to be like Albert Pinkham Ryder, working
quietly and cheaply alone. Almost all of the best work now is
three-dimensional, as I said before. I don’t see how the artists
can pay for their work; which means, how can art continue ?
The situation seems hopeless.
To repeat in some detail, color and three-dimensional
space were placed directly on the oor, as one. Neither existed
before. A direct relationship to the supporting structure had
not existed before. Despite some geometric painting in New
York related to Mondrian, which was ignored, despite Albers
and Reinhardt, who were disparaged, despite Noland, who
was praised, the geometry, color, space, and the relationship to
the support were completely new. My attitude toward geom-
etry was new. It was not at all related to Mondrian’s attitude,
which was so clear and developed, like red, yellow, blue, and
white, that I long thought that all geometry belonged to
Mondrian. Geometry and mathematics are human inventions.
I use a small, simple portion in my work for my purposes.
Four units in a row are only that. They are not part of innity,
either endless or above or within. They are a small, nite order
that I am interested in. They are not the turtle that supports
the world. There are a lot of rectangles in the world and one
that I have made exists as one of them. The idea of a rectangle
exists only as an idea, which is easy for rectangles and dicult
for most ideas. The idea of an automobile becomes uncertain;
the idea of the society can’t be claried as an idea; the idea
of the universe is pretty much a collection of facts. This is why
Plato proposed the forms.
When I was making the paintings and the rst three-
dimensional works I knew how far I had to go and how
new the work had to be to be my own. Pollock, Newman,
Mondrian, and all rst-rate artists establish that distance.
The negative force, like Locke’s “uneasiness,” is that it is not
possible to understand borrowed colors and forms suciently
to make new rst-rate work. Many artists in the s and
at the present think that it is enough to go next door, even to
the neighbors. Some in New York in the s looked at
Pollock and the others and made passable work for a few years
and then once secure did what they wanted to do in the rst
place, as did Warhol, or they didn’t know what to do, as Stella
doesn’t. They were made by the high situation in New York
and then they helped to destroy it, which in general is the
story of art appreciation in New York. Earlier, for example, but
better, the work of Guston and Kline was made by the situation.
Most work was not unusual enough to be anyone’s; most
was not sucient. It was not enough to vary the predictable;
it was not enough to renovate old brushwork.
Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still were the best artists
and could not be matched in painting, which therefore could
not continue at that level. Noland and especially Louis are
good artists but their work is not equal. I didn’t think when
I said thirty years ago that painting was nished that it would
be so thoroughly nished. The achievement of Pollock and the
others meant that century’s development of color could con-
tinue no further on a at surface. Its adventitious capacity to
destroy naturalism also could not continue. Perhaps Pollock,
Newman, Rothko, and Still were the last painters. I like Agnes
Martin’s paintings. Someday, not soon, there will be another
kind of painting, far from the easel, far from beyond the easel,
since our environment indoors is four walls, usually at.
Color to continue had to occur in space.
The subject of color in regard to myself and to everyone
else is obviously too large for this essay. I think now that I
intended to write a particular book; instead this is a general
essay. I wanted to begin with Aristotle and to continue with
Newton and discuss all the color theories and circles. I wanted
to discuss Goethe and M. E. Chevreul, whose book I’ve had
for thirty years, inadvertently on loan from Ed Clark, and
Adolf Hölzel, who taught at the Stuttgart Academy when
Itten was a student there, who taught that colors have feelings.
Like the history of the nation taught in school, which never
continues beyond the glorious beginning, I would never have
reached the inglorious present, in which there is my own work,
which is of more interest to me. I’m going to neglect all of
my work until some of which is made of aluminum sheet
painted in colors.
Color will always be interpreted in a new way, so that
I hardly think my use is nal, in fact I think it is a beginning.
Innite change may be its constant nature. Color is opposite to
the projection of feeling described to Goethe, Hölzel, and
Itten. The idealism of Mondrian is very dierent. The attitude
of Albers is dierent again. No immediate feeling can be
attributed to color. Nothing can be identied. If it seems
otherwise, usually the association is cultural, for example, the
light blue and white, supposedly the colors of peace, of the
cops, and the United Nations. If there were an identiable
feeling to red or to red and black together they would not be
usable to me.
Color is like material. It is one way or another, but it
obdurately exists. Its existence as it is is the main fact and not
what it might mean, which may be nothing. Or rather, color
does not connect alone to any of the several states of the
mind. I mention the word “epistemology” and stop. Color, like
material, is what art is made from. It alone is not art. Itten
confused the components with the whole. Other than the
spectrum, there is no pure color. It always occurs on a surface
which has no texture or which has a texture or which is be-
neath a transparent surface.
In the sheet aluminum works I wanted to use more and
diverse bright colors than before. As I will describe later, there
are many combinations, some old as I listed, and some my own
from earlier work. I wanted to avoid both of these. I especially
didn’t want the combinations to be harmonious, an old and
implicative idea, which is the easiest to avoid, or to be inhar-
monious in reaction, which is harder to avoid. I wanted all of
the colors to be present at once. I didn’t want them to combine.
I wanted a multiplicity all at once that I had not known before.
This was very dicult. The construction of the work in panels
limited the use of ratio, the extent of one color to another,
but this is perhaps just as well.
After a few decades the discussion of color is so unknown
that it would have to begin with a spot. How large is it ? Is it
on a at surface ? How large is that ? What color is that ? What
color is the spot ? Red. If a second spot is placed on the surface,
what color is it ? Black ? What if both spots were red, or black ?
How far away is the black spot from the red spot ? Enough for
these to be two discrete spots, one red and one black ? Or near
enough for there to be a pair of spots, red and black ? Or apart
enough for this to be uncertain ?
What if the red and black spots are next to each other ?
And of course, which red ? Cadmium red medium, and which
black ? Ivory black. The red could also be cadmium red light,
the medium, cadmium red dark, or alizarin crimson. In a way,
side by side, the red and the black become one color. They
become a two-color monochrome. Red and black together
are so familiar that they almost form a new unity. Every easily
known color paired with either black or white forms such a
monochrome: orange, yellow, blue, green. Because of the black
and white, also a pair, these pairs have a somewhat at quality,
are somewhat monochromatic.
The contrasting pairs are just as well known: red and blue,
red and green, red and yellow, blue and green, blue and yellow.
Some are not: red and orange, yellow and orange. This list is
nite, since it is of primaries and secondaries. The other pos-
sible pairs are innite, as is color, whether in the spectrum or
materially mixed. All colors of the same value, such as light
yellow and light green, make pairs. All values of the same color
make pairs. Full colors pair, such as cadmium red medium,
cadmium orange medium, and cadmium yellow medium.
A group of colors, without an adjective like “full,” that I
especially like is of course cadmium red light, cerulean blue,
chartreuse, and permanent green. In another work
on the oor was painted chartreuse with half of an inset iron
pipe sprayed cream yellow, a somewhat sharp and acid color
opposed to one white and full. Words to describe colors
are scarce. The really acid colors, clear, sharp, and dark, are
phthalocyanine blue and green. Also clear and sharp and
not as dark are the seemingly stained colors like those used by
El Greco: alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, and viridian.
These also occur in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux opposed to
grisaille. The somewhat soft colors correspond. These are full
but seem to have white mixed in them, which they don’t:
cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow light, emerald green,
and especially cobalt blue. Dull or grayed colors, the ochers,
the oxides, all form pairs, united by value. And, as in the
chartreuse work, there are pairs opposed: cobalt blue and
cerulean blue, cobalt blue and cadmium red light.
There are also monochromatic triads, red and black and
white, and there are contrasting triads. There are sequential
triads of color and value: cadmium red light, medium, and
dark. And then color becomes complicated: red, black, and
cadmium yellow light, medium, or dark. Then perhaps red and
black and the pair (
+
) or (
+
) or (
+
)
+
(
+
)
+
(
+
) or (
+
)
+
(
+
)
+
(
+
). The schemes for the large
works with colored panels are very complicated. Often they
require all possible combinations of four colors or eight colors.
The colors cannot touch side by side or end to end. In the
work the relationships of the colors are dierently intelligible.
One above another they are easy to see as a pair; diagonally
they are not. Basically I want the pairs and the sequences and
the possibilities to be only color. The structure is part of
the whole. Chaos would not achieve what I want. It requires
a greater number, which if great enough becomes order. First,
the parts would touch, and second, the colors would not be
distributed more or less evenly. But mainly the initial selection
of colors prohibits randomness. In a note of I wrote that
form, which I don’t like so much as a word, and color should
be “intelligent without being ordered.”
Color of course can be an image or a symbol, as is the peace-
ful blue and white, often combined with olive drab, but these
are no longer present in the best art. By denition, images and
symbols are made by institutions. A pair of colors that I knew
of as a child in Nebraska was red and black, which a book
said was the “favorite” of the Lakota. In the codices of the Maya
red and black signify wisdom and are the colors of scholars.
The painting of the generation in Europe after Mondrian
and Matisse was obscured by World War , as everything
civilized is obscured by war, which is a consequence delightful
to soldiers, so that the continuity and the innovation of
the new art was not considered. The artists who especially
developed color were Olle Bærtling, who also developed
space in his sculpture, and Richard Paul Lohse. In the United
States, where art is always obscure, partly because of the
permanent military, in addition to Albers, from Bottrop, and
Reinhardt, there was especially Al Jensen, from Guatemala,
from among the Maya.
Donald Judd Text © Judd Foundation
