Art: Exquisite Minimalist

No movement, no gesture, no direction. No mass (only gleaming metal surfaces and transparencies of color per-spex). No pedestal: the box on the floor is the sculpture. No metaphor, no image, and especially no relation or reference to the human figure.

Described in terms of what it is not, Don Judd's sculpture must inevitably sound cold and vacuous—a Pandora's box of absences. But Judd, at 42, is possibly the most influential sculptor of his generation. His austere and intensely deliberate art has proved a disinfectant, sluicing away the organic waste that tended in the...