‘Not so much a line as a star’: Donald Judd in the Low Countries, 1965–71

Abstract

Historiographical accounts of the American artist Donald Judd, and of minimalist art in general, have focused primarily on the debates surrounding the emergence of his work in the United States, and New York in particular, from the mid to late 1960s. Little is known about Judd’s early exposure in Europe, from the artist’s inclusion in a group show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1965, until his first solo show in Europe at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 1970. Based on hitherto unpublished material from archives in the Netherlands and Belgium, the region commonly known as the Low Countries, this article aims to show that in the very same years that the artist established his formal and conceptual language in the US, his work also met with exponentially growing institutional and critical interest in Europe.