Morgan Falconer
24 September 2025
From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Several years before Donald Judd established himself as one of the leading exponents of minimalism, he painted an intriguingly unresolved picture. It was 1957, and he was moving between cheap apartments in New York. He had studied philosophy at Columbia University, he was returning there to pursue an MA in art history, and he had trained more informally as a painter at the Art Students League. He had also served with the US Army in Korea, which likely explains the picture’s title, A Defile, a word that can describe troops marching in a column, or a narrow passageway between mountains or hills. The painting isn’t Abstract Expressionist – which was then the reigning doctrine in New York – but neither is it geometric, nor Op, nor some Jasper Johns mode of proto-Pop. But in its purely abstract arrangement of subtly sliding planes and its spatial ambiguity, you sense a young painter fully in charge of their medium, even if they haven’t yet found their compass.
Judd knew it was a success and he donated it to what is now the Staten Island Museum – the first of his pictures to enter a public collection. The picture is just like the good work of thousands of other talented young artists: you sense they are inches from some powerful mature style, some career-defining problem. Maybe they’ll reach it tomorrow, or maybe never.
