Table from the Walker house, Marfa

Donald Judd rented his first residence in Marfa in the summer of 1972. Known as the Walker House, it was located in an area of the town known as Sal Si Puedes ("Get out if you can.") The house was later purchased by Judd, although he had long since moved to the center of town. In the timeline of Judd's furniture designs, he noted in 1993, "The roughly made pine furniture made by me and others in Texas was made first, with a few exceptions."

"I rented a small house on the edge of the town. The house was quartered into eleven by eleven foot rooms. There was no furniture and none to be bought, either old, since the town had not shrunk or changed much since its beginning in 1886, or new, since the few stores sold only fake antiques or tubular kitchen furniture with plastic surfaces printed with inane geometric patterns of flowers....I designed a bed...so that the lumberyard could cut the few different lengths to size and I could then nail them together in place. I liked the bed a great deal, and in fact the whole house, for which I made other furniture."

Pine
40 x 19 3/4 x 25 3/4 in.
(101.6 x 50.1 x 65.4 cm)

Provenance:
Donald Judd, The Walker House,
Marfa, Texas
The Judd Foundation
The house and its contents acquired by the present owner, 1998

Literature:
Donald Judd, "On Furniture," 1985, in COMPLETE WRITINGS, Eindhoven 1987, pp.107-110
DONALD JUDD: FURNITURE RETROSPECTIVE, exh. cat., Rotterdam 1993, pp. 19, 24-25 (for similar models)
DONALD JUDD: RAUME SPACES, Stuttgart, 1993, pp. 32, 37, 78-79