Exclusive: Donald Judd 
was designer of Weetabix  

By our arts correspondent Dave Dimwit

The small rectangular slabs of compressed wheat with elegantly rounded ends that became the globally popular breakfast cereal known as Weetabix, were designed by the late American minimalist sculptor Donald Judd in a rare student freelance commission, it was revealed this week.

minimalist breakfast

A series of elaborate technical drawings for the cereal biscuits were discovered in a hitherto unknown archive of private papers that Judd had secreted away in the trunk of a rusting Cadillac found abandoned on the outskirts of Marfa, the remote Texan outpost that became a museum of the artist's work after his death in 1994. It is thought that once he'd become famous for making formica boxes sticking out of the wall he sought to hide his earlier freelance jobs.

"This is a remarkable discovery that will require us to completely rethink the entire history of American minimalism," said art historian Zipper 'Dee' Doodah of the University of Wisconsin. "Breakfast will never be the same again."

At a rapidly convened symposium at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, a group of internationally renowned scholars struggled to assess the consequences of the revelation. 

"These simple brown wheaty briquettes have been revealed as nothing less than sublime expressions of a rigorous minimalist aesthetic," said Professor Delroy Yummy of the Smithsonian Institution. 

Reverently extracting a Weetabix biscuit from its humble paper wrapping, Dr Yummy held it up to the light and, with tears welling up behind his Herzog & De Meuron-designed titanium spectacles, embarked upon a rapturuous emcomium. 

"Note the gentle curve at each end of the form," said Professor Yummy, "surely an ironic denial of the parallel lines that define our existence and which would otherwise reach, impossibly, but hopefully, to infinity. It is, quite simply, nothing less than a Minimalist masterstroke. André was never capable of this kind of poetry."

Towards the end of the symposium, Siegfried Schlurp, an artist based in Malibu, Florida, took seven giant versions of the biscuits and attached them to the wall in a vertical line to form a classic Juddian architectural ladder tower. It was immediately purchased for $7 million by New York hedge fund manager and collector Steve Cohen. 

Dave Dimwit

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