The session started with 26 works described in a special catalogue prudently titled "Donald Judd: Selected Works from the Judd Foundation." Judd did not sign any work. He had them stamped. Nor did he personally make them. All were fabricated to his specifications and invariably looked like industrial elements or machinery components.
The second lot, for example, stamped "Donald Judd 89-47 Lascaux Materials Ltd., Brooklyn, N.Y." on the reverse was made of aluminum painted blue on two sides and white on two long central blocks. It could easily have been mistaken for bookshelves of the kinddestined for a schoolboy's room. When that made an impressive $486,400 - 20 percent more than the high estimate - experiencedmarket hands suspected that they were witnessing a new phenomenon. And after the three most expensive "Selected Works from the Judd Foundation" each brought $2.7 million, they felt sure about it. Each of the works in question consisted of identical units looking like plywood boxes set into the wall one above the other.
This description of the performance of some Judd works at an auction, quoted above, appears here.
The image at the top of the post originally appeared here.
