of its sister, the thoughtful minimalist abode. (My own
praise for such interiors is the word, borrowed from the
Amish, Plain.) Edmund White once wrote a novel called
The Beautiful Room is Empty. I tend to agree, and I
think Judd, who eschewed the term Minimalist, would
have, too.
In fact, the loft on Spring Street is not empty at all, merely
sparing: it is Plain. What it lacks in number of objects, it
makes up for in the seminal, exalted quality of the things
Judd owned and carefully arranged. In a New York Times
article about the space, Roberta Smith stated, "Every
object chez Judd had a kind of personality or presence,
as if it had been carefully scrutinized before being let in
the door, which it had."
What did Judd have? Tables and benches of his own
exacting design, other furniture by Rietveld and Aalto, all
of wood. Stacks of sharpened drawing pencils, serried
rows of found stones, a collection of his children's
ceramics. African sculptures stand sentinel upon the
five-story staircase.
I used to own a book by the Trappist monk and mystic,
Thomas Merton. Called A Hidden Wholeness, it was
a curious collection of black and white photographs
Merton took of his abode. I remember especially his
HYLAND
