Wholesale Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd

This important new publication collects more than 20 years of sustained thinking about Donald Judd from one of today’s most respected art historians and theorists. In Sensuous Thoughts, Richard Shiff draws on Judd’s own writing, on the work of the pragmatist philosophers Charles Sander Pierce and William James, and on interviews with many of Judd's contemporaries and close relations, to dramatically enhance the act of looking at Judd’s work. Across nearly 300 pages, Shiff closely explicates such topics as Judd's dialogues with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Bontecou and Claes Oldenburg, among others; while other essays examine the impact that Judd's writings, such as "Specific Objects," had on his own work. Sensuous Thoughts also includes 140 color images as both reference throughout and in a dedicated plate section in the back of the book. Richard Shiff (born 1943) is the author of Doubt: Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism and Writing after Art: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Artists, and is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin.