We are talking about, for example, an untitled piece from 1964: a wall-mounted, square-sectioned, polished brass tube, seven feet long, from which descend five vertical tubes in iron, lacquered blue. Of the same vintage, there’s a rectangular box, almost four feet long, with a top and sides of translucent orange Plexiglas and ends of hot-rolled steel. The works register as material propositions of certain principles—chiefly, openness and clarity. They aren’t about anything. They afford no traction for analysis while making you more or less conscious of your physical relation to them, and to the space that you and they share. As installed by the curator Ann Temkin, with perfectly paced samples of Judd’s major motifs—among them, floor-to-ceiling “stacks” of shelflike units, mostly of metal-framed, tinted Plexiglas, which expose and flavor the space they occupy—the second of the show’s four big rooms amounts to a Monument Valley of the minimalist sublime. Don’t miss it. Less enchanting, though expertly appointed, are a room of tentative early work and two that feature such later developments as boothlike, angled constructions, at joins of wall and floor, in raw plywood; large aluminum boxes containing differently oriented, lushly colored sheets of Plexiglas; and a huge congeries, nearly six feet high by more than twenty-four feet long, of stacked, bolted, and multicolored horizontal aluminum open boxes.

Not represented are Judd’s curatorial adventures, which included an exquisitely revamped building at 101 Spring Street, where he lived for a time and experimented with ways of installing art. It has been preserved as a museum. Then came the artist’s Bayreuth, his Mecca, in the remote (from anywhere!) desert town of Marfa, West Texas. There, starting in 1971, he converted old military, civic, commercial, and domestic buildings to house permanent and temporary installations of his work, that of artists he favored, and his collections of Navajo blankets and other choice craft objects. He also created studios, guest quarters, and his own living space, tucked into one end of a former gymnasium.

Works by Judd are almost routinely beautiful, but coldly and even imperiously so, as if their quality were none of your business. If you have any feeling, it might be chagrin at being underqualified to cope with so rigorous a visual intelligence. He’s Donald Judd; you’re not. He came on as a Savonarola of art in early writings and interviews, preaching a chastened aesthetic that should be “non-naturalistic, non-imagistic, non-expressionist,” in addition to “unrelational,” “nonillusionistic,” and “neither painting nor sculpture.” That dispenses with an awful lot of what normally appeals to people about art, leaving, in my case, a state of chilled awe. The one solid pleasure still provided is that of decoration: art that is meant not to be looked at but to be seen in relation to the environments that it enhances—keeping in mind that Judd’s ideal environments are voids. (Come to that, we owe to Minimalism the stubborn fashion in architecture and design of hygienically spare, white-walled interiors and sleekly simplified commodities.) Success did not mellow him. Nor was he much given to humor. His statement of purpose, in 1986, for the Chinati Foundation, which he instituted for Marfa, admits no doubt about the grandeur, and the grandiosity, of his enterprise: “Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.” Visiting those places, you’re not an art lover. You’re a pilgrim.

Judd’s extraordinary connoisseurship shines in the reviews he wrote—some six hundred of them—between 1959 and 1965, most for Arts Magazine. Gathered in a cherishable book, “Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975,” they combine lucid description and fearless judgment in a bracingly forthright, no-nonsense style that makes other critics of the time, and most of us since then, seem flabby by comparison. Almost always, when an artist is familiar to me Judd’s assessment is penetrating and dead-on correct, while never gentle. (Imagine being Charles Cajori, a fair-to-middling second-generation Abstract Expressionist, and reading a review of your work that begins “The color is gray, varied some, and a little grayed blue and orange. It could not be less considered.”) Judd’s later writing, from the seventies to the nineties, runs to jeremiads against the thick-headedness and what he deemed the incompetence of art-world institutions. He regularly had good reason to complain of damage to his works returned from museum shows. Minimalist art was long vulnerable to art handlers and viewers who barely saw it as art, and to children who mistook it for playground equipment. Absolute physical perfection, destructible by a nick or a fingerprint, is as essential to Judd’s aesthetic as it was, before him, to Brancusi’s, and, more recently, to that of Jeff Koons.

A wonderment of the MOMA show is that it is installed with no physical, or even indicated, barriers. Temkin, fingers crossed, acknowledged to me that the presence of the works would be compromised otherwise. It’s worth pausing to note that probably only MOMA commands the clout, the cash, and the expertise to gather, from many collections, the number and quality of so many fragile treasures. The chance surely won’t recur to take the measure—platinum-iridium grade or not—of an artist whose influence on our art and, sub rosa, our lives in common, remains beyond large, engulfing. ♦