Though he was not yet fully confident in his personal artistic practice, Judd led Bellamy up to his studio to see the work he was making, which had evolved over the ’50s from abstract geometric prints and paintings into three-dimensional objects made to hang on the wall or rest on the floor. The visit led to Judd’s 1963 solo show, which populated the Green Gallery’s white walls and narrow wood floor with geometric boxes made of plywood coated in light cadmium red paint. The sculptures were abstract forms, like machines for accomplishing incomprehensible tasks. They were inorganic and yet not quite industrial. Judd had made them by hand with his father, Roy, an executive for Western Union and a skilled woodworker.
The show included forms like ramps, shelves, and racks, but there was no way to interact with the pieces and no clear meaning to be interpreted. The intentional lack of content in the show was an affront to established art-world tastes. In Art in America, the critic Hilton Kramer described Judd’s debut as “indifferent to formal analysis and metaphor.” Other critics called the weirdly mundane pieces useless objects, nonart, and aesthetic furniture.
Judd’s work looked like it was supposed to be art but wasn’t. Didn’t art need to have more intention, more symbolism, some kind of emotional impact instead of all that cool distance? The pieces didn’t sell well, but neither did much of the work Bellamy curated, and by 1965 Green Gallery was failing. “I had to close the gallery; couldn’t get no bank behind me,” he lamented in a characteristically casual letter. Too ahead of the times—though he did manage to sell one of Judd’s sculptures, four metal cubes connected by a square pipe, to Philip Johnson for $300. The artist figured any act of good taste originated with Bellamy rather than the architect, whom Judd dismissed during a gossipy interview with the art critic Lucy Lippard in 1968. (The interview is the surest sign of Judd’s identity as a workaday art critic: full of complaints about magazine deadlines, freelance rates, and capricious editors.)
A critical essay Judd began writing in 1964 gave him the opportunity to present his side of the story. “Specific Objects” was published in 1965 in Arts Yearbook 8. Contrary to his dislike of movements and easy narratives, Judd used the essay to gather a group of his contemporaries and observe certain themes shared in their work. Many of the approving pronouncements Judd made could just as easily have applied to his own untitled objects.
“Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture,” he began. (Judd loved deeming things best or worst.) Painting is bad because it’s boring and overdone, he argued—abstract expressionism had hit a wall—and sculpture is bad because it resembles things that already exist—human figures, animals, landscapes—so it’s unoriginal. The most important quality for Judd is a kind of enlightened simplicity, a unity in which all the parts of a work of art form a single coherent whole that depends on nothing but itself rather than referring to a preexisting object. He calls this quality “specific” and “three-dimensional” in the essay.