Donald Judd

“The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.”

“You're only dealing with whatever you know, which is a very small part of it and later on it'll look like it has something to do with the period. Obviously, the artists have something to do with one another. They tend to set up certain common qualities among themselves.”

“I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.”

“Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.”

“Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.”

“I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality.”

“Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.”

“Tolstoy may not be showing that much of Russia at that time even. It's hard to tell. You tend to associate the quality of the period with what's lasted - what's still good. And that quality becomes the whole period.”

“After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.”

“Well, its very exasperating when you can't get it right.”

“I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once.”

“Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.”

“Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.”

“Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.”

“I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.”

“Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.”

“I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.”

“And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.”

“They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.”

“But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.”