Creativity Quote by Donald Judd

Judd’s line reads like a throwaway clarification, but it’s actually a quiet declaration of independence from the standard museum script. In mid-century art history, Barnett Newman gets cast as the cool, declarative radical: the “zip,” the metaphysical void, the clean break from painterly heroics. Jackson Pollock, by contrast, is often filed under Abstract Expressionism’s signature look and mythology: the macho gesture, the drip as pure feeling. Judd refuses the filing cabinet.

The key move is his insistence that Pollock is “just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.” He’s not praising Pollock for embodying Expressionism; he’s prying Pollock loose from it. That matters coming from Judd, a Minimalist who spent a career arguing that categories were lazy shortcuts, and that the real issue was what an artwork does in space, material, and perception. Pollock’s drip paintings, in Judd’s reading, aren’t confessional storms; they’re procedural, literal, almost anti-Expressionist: paint as matter, surface as field, composition as distributed all-over structure. Radicality becomes a question of method, not mood.

The subtext is also a jab at critical gatekeeping. If Newman can be granted “radical” status because he looks austere and theoretically compatible with later Minimalism, why can’t Pollock, whose innovation is messier to narrate? Judd is protecting a lineage: not a march from emotion to coolness, but a set of inventions that scramble the very labels we use to domesticate them.