“At [Leo] Castelli’s in 1966, I was struck by the way [Donald] Judd’s friezelike wall sculptures defied the possibility for the viewer to grasp them frontally, as a whole. The width of the serial appendages that hung from the horizontal bars varied progressively, like the transversals of a perspective diagram. For me, this fact folded the work into the Renaissance pictorial tradition. My review, ‘Allusion and Illusion in the Work of Donald Judd,’ was generated by this observation.” For the sixtieth anniversary issue of ‘Artforum,’ art historian Rosalind E. Krauss reflects on one of the first assignments as a staff writer in February 1966 for founding editor Philip Leider. Krauss notes “It was my first encounter with Minimalism, and I was totally unprepared for it.” In his Editor’s Letter David Velasco writes: “Sixty years ago in Artforum’s very first issue, our founding editor, Philip Leider, threw down the gauntlet for art’s autonomy. ‘Art and artists will flourish when an admiring public buys paintings because they love them; if the myth that buying art is a good investment (in the Wall Street sense) is perpetuated, the result can only be disaster for both.’ I took his words—from a blistering review of two 1961 publications on art and money—as an early expression of the magazine’s ethos, which made speculation a constitutive exclusion. The keyword for me here was not myth or disaster but love.” Read the “The Art We Love,” with texts by Krauss, Ralph Lemon, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen in the September issue of ‘Artforum,’ link in bio. Image: Donald Judd assembling his work at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1966. Photo Bob Adelman © Bob Adelman Estate.