S PA N I E R M A N M O D E R N 53 EAST 58TH STREET TEL (212) 832-1400

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JUDITH GODWIN

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Judith Godwin Paintings 1954 – 2002 E S S AY S B Y L O W E R Y S T O K E S S I M S A N D D AV I D E B O N Y

NOVEMBER 30 – DECEMBER 30, 2010

Published in the United States of America in 2010 by Spanierman Modern, 53 East 58th Street, New York, NY 10022

S PA N I E R M A N M O D E R N

Copyright © 2010 Spanierman Modern. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers. isbn 978-1-935617-06-8 Photography: Roz Akin Design: Amy Pyle, Light Blue Studio B

53 EAST 58TH STREET

NEW YORK, NY 10022-1617

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Judith Godwin at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, with Nucleus II (1950)

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W W W. S PA N I E R M A N M O D E R N . C O M

Judith Godwin in her studio with Strike (National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan)

INTRODUCTION

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hen Bill Chiego, director of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, sent me a copy of the catalogue for the museum’s 2008 exhibition, Judith Godwin: Early Abstractions, I felt an immediate excitement on seeing the work that was illustrated. Shortly thereafter, I visited Godwin’s studio. As we pulled paintings from the storage racks, I was overwhelmed by their fantastic emotional impact. I was struck by how instinctively Godwin knows where her brush should go, how it should go, and what it should be doing. It was clear to me that her informed brushstrokes were the extension of a physicality and energy that expressed an inner emotional battle. I sensed an enormous struggle in her work, a tension between several forces, each contending for supremacy. The dynamic qualities and wonderful colors in her paintings communicated a sometimes fierce and violent dialogue. To me the paintings represent both the artist’s inner conflicts and her reactions to the frenzied and fluctuating state of the world at a time when the atom bomb was dropped and the moon was reached. Godwin’s paintings are compelling references to the power of those events that affect all of us in our daily lives. We are grateful to Lowery Stokes Sims and David Ebony, who granted us permission to reprint their essays from the McNay catalogue, which encapsulate the essence of Godwin’s art, the artistic milieu in which her career unfolded, and her sources of inspiration. A heartfelt thank you is due to the McNay Art Museum, especially Bill Chiego and Rene Barilleaux. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Karl Willers for his special assistance with this exhibition. In her work on the catalogue, Amy Pyle, of Light Blue Studio, provided us, as always, with a wonderful design. All members of the Spanierman Gallery staff contributed to this undertaking, notably Roz Akin, Lisa Barrette, Katherine Bogden, Martha Campbell, and Lisa N. Peters. I would like to give particular commendation to Betsy Ann Craig for her tireless effort and dedication to coordinating this exhibition. Ira Spanierman

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JUDITH GODWIN: OBJECTIFIED GESTURE

Lowery Stokes Sims

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Lowery Stokes Sims, “Judith Godwin: Objectified Gesture,” reprinted from Judith Godwin: Early Abstractions (San Antonio: McNay Art Museum, 2008), 10–14.

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ennies, beads, hacksaw blades, sections of wood veneer, ribbons, gold leaf, stretched-out steel wool—all scrounged from around Judith Godwin’s studio—are as prosaic as they are interventionist. In one of her most arresting paintings a round brush with an open white handle dominates the center. Bristles swirl in the thick of orange and silver paint, mimicking a technical movement customarily made by a painting implement. Gesture frozen in an object. Early in the 1990s Godwin began to commit acts of assemblage on her canvases. When asked why and how her work took this direction, she replied, “I think it came out of needing to add something to the surfaces of my paintings.”1 Godwin integrates collaged elements in such a way that they preserve visual unity in the works. Their presence is not immediately noticeable but reveals itself gradually—like a visual puzzle. “I don’t want them to jump out,” Godwin asserts.2 If this development of her work was, as she declares, a matter of impulse, then the immediacy of the action was in step with the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism. As writer Paul Ryan declared in 1988, “Godwin’s work and style as a painter is grounded in Abstract Expressionism.”3 Art historian Robert Hobbs additionally notes that the “cast of players” assigned to the Abstract Expressionist drama has changed to include artists marginalized in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s because they were women, of color,4 or simply younger than the canonical group represented by the “Irascibles” in the infamous photograph by Nina Leen for LIFE magazine in 1951. Judith Godwin did not get to New York City until 1953. Her work at the Art Students League and Hans Hofmann’s schools in Manhattan and Provincetown put her in contact with figures as varied as Dadaist Marcel Duchamp—by then a protean presence in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village—as well as figures associated with pre-Abstract Expressionist abstraction, such as Vaclav Vytacil, Harry Sternberg, and Will Barnet. She also met the canonical leaders of the movement: James Brooks,Willem de Kooning,

Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Godwin’s emergence in the New York art scene coincided with that of Helen Frankthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell. In their work a variety of Abstract Expressionist permutations were evident from the art world at that time. Frankenthaler gravitated to a thinner surface, staining paint into the surface of the canvas. Godwin, like Hartigan and Mitchell, explored intimations of figure/ground relationships rendered in textural gestures. Godwin’s 1953 paintings such as Yellow Figure and Indian evidence the strong, aggressive approach that she felt she had to develop to silence the naysayers among male members of the New York School. “The men simply said, ‘Women can’t paint.’ There was just a dismissal of women at that time.”5 Her anger was a source of strength and helped her to persevere in a time and place when women still depended heavily on men or family money to establish and sustain them in the art world.6 Despite societal expectations of women in the 1940s and 50s, Godwin was inspired and encouraged in her vocation and talent by both of her parents, and then by teachers such as Teresa Pollock, Maurice Bonds, and Jewett Campbell at Virginia Commonwealth University where she got her advanced degree. When I asked how she became aware of modern art, she cited Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and added that she began to paint abstractly while still in college. Paintings such as Nucleus and Nucleus II of 1950, painted before she moved to New York City, show a highly personal interpretation of free form and cubist gird. A dancer, not a painter, got Godwin to come to New York. She had become familiar with modern dance and Martha Graham in particular through photographs. She was fascinated by the motion and strong angularity of Graham’s signature poses, the distinctive costuming, and the particular way that fabric fell over the dancer’s extreme extensions of her limbs. Godwin and Graham finally met in Virginia and the dancer encouraged her to come to New York. Although she invited Godwin to come to her studio, the artist never pursued dance, but attended as many of Graham’s performances as possible and became a personal friend. “I was totally enamored of Martha Graham,” she related.7 Her 1956 painting Martha Graham—Lamentation conveys the dramatic diagonals and angularity of Graham’s technique. Strong contrasts of blacks and whites, as well as dark shades of blues and browns, in this work and those that follow over the next few

1.

ECHOES, NO. 2

1954

O I L O N C A N VA S

4 0 3⁄ 4 x 3 0 I N .

5

years—Into the Depth (1957), Trial (1957–59), Night (1958)—show an evolution away from the colorful, lively, crenulated surfaces of the previous three years. The earlier works marked a synthesis of the cubistic, gestural, and textural surfaces that correlate with the work of Hofmann, de Kooning, and Hartigan. It is tempting to relate Godwin’s development to her determination to assert her place in the art world by paring down color; cultivating strong, aggressive brushwork; and eliminating intimations of lightness or gaiety. Directions Godwin has pursued in some later work (e.g. Sea Squall, 1998, and Touch of Passion, 2007) are therefore all the more fascinating. It is as if she no longer feels the need to make that point of strength and seriousness. Forms are more open, the use of color more lyrical in stark contrast with the [earlier] gestural work. The gestural and bristled brushiness of her signature work has given way to effusions of color—some metallic—puddled in biomorphic, organic shapes on the surface of the canvas. Where dramatic blacks, blues, whites, and full throttled hues were dominant then, now they give way to pinks, pale blues, ethereal grayed values of colors, yellows, and oranges. Godwin replaced more cubistic structure of earlier work, such as the dramatic horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and occasionally arc-ed thrusts of the 1950s through the 80s that provided a mode of scaffolding for her painterly dramas, with a sense of erratic and lyrical skipping from episode to episode on the canvas, reaffirming her love of dance and music. What is most surprising is the appearance of unmistakably feminine elements such as velvet violets and black sequins set into the pigments. How exactly are we to read these elements in these paintings? When I suggested that they seem to express some personal or autobiographic nuances in her work she demurred: “I’m not sure. . . .”8 Others writing on Godwin’s work have mentioned her passion for gardening.9 Violets hint at this as does some perversely stereotypical suggestion of her southern upbringing as a genteel young woman. Since she has worked so hard to move beyond her past and find her true self, we can look to the bits of veneer and chains and files to find the antipodes of the violets and an allusion to her work and skill in masonry and construction.10 Functioning as visual and textural parts, these collaged elements position Godwin’s work within various concepts associated with postmodernism: pastiche, parody. They fill in for what would other-

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wise be painted on and interject a nuance of virtual reality (virtu-ality) to the paintings. While this gesture is parodist in nature—that is, characterized by imitation and repetition—it lacks the derisive aspects that English literature professor Simon Dentith identifies as an element of parody.11 The collaged pieces also contradict notions of painting as a purely two-dimensional phenomenon, in direct defiance of modernist dictates promulgated by critic Clement Greenberg in the post-World War II era, and effectively deconstruct modernism’s dictates that art reveal itself for what it is materially, eschewing illusion and allusion. The presence of these collaged elements suggests the artist’s associations and personal existential history, and thus challenges the definite distinction that Greenberg drew between “art” and “kitsch.”12 This aspect of her recent work allows us to bring postmodern notions of identity and gender and then decipher their meanings in these works for ourselves. While Judith Godwin’s life work to date could be classified as a summary of twentiethcentury abstract art, clearly she has challenged us to recognize that the best just might be yet to come.

1. Judith Godwin, conversation with author in Godwin’s studio, New York City, March 26, 2008. 2. Ibid. 3. Paul Ryan, “Reading the Paintings of Judith Godwin,” in Mary Baldwin College Magazine (Fall 1988), 13. 4. Robert Hobbs, “Judith Godwin’s Critique of Abstract Expressionism,” in Judith Godwin, Paintings: 1953–1992, exh. cat. (New York: Marisa del Re Gallery, 1992), unpaginated. For the revisions of Abstract Expressionism see Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997); David Craven, “Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to ‘American’ Art.” Oxford Art Journal 121, no. 1 (1990): 44–65; and Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). 5. Judith Godwin, conversation with author at Godwin’s studio, New York City, March 26, 2008. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. See Robert Hobbs, “Judith Godwin’s Critique of Abstract Expressionism,” unpaginated. 10. Judith Godwin, conversation with author at Godwin’s studio, New York City, March 26, 2008. 11. Simon Dentith, Parody (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. 12. See Margaret Iversen, “Readymade, found object, photograph,” http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m045/is_2_63/ ai_n6155497/print. Originally published in Art Journal (Summer 2004).

2.

PINK SKY POND

1960

A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S

24 x 36 IN.

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Abstractness is a means by which the picture interprets what it portrays. Abstractness is not incompleteness. A picture is a statement about visual qualities, and such a statement can be complete at any level of abstractness. —Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking 1

A B S T R A C T P O R T R AYA L S : T H E W O R K O F J U D I T H G O D W I N

David Ebony

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David Ebony, “Abstract Portrayals: The Work of Judith Godwin,” reprinted from Judith Godwin: Early Abstractions (San Antonio: McNay Art Museum, 2008), 16–19.

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ather than abstraction, Judith Godwin’s work could well be thought of in terms of abstractness, as proposed by philosopher and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007), for Godwin’s work encompasses a complete statement about painting. Trace movements of paint across the surface, selection of colors, textural nuances, and structural build-up in each piece also form a compelling statement about the artist herself. An astute observer of nature, with a background in landscape design as well as in the push and pull dynamics of Hans Hofmann, her teacher and mentor, Godwin from the early 1950s on summoned the forces of abstraction to her side. They have remained at her disposal ever since. Today, her works appear fresh and commanding, relevant in many ways to a new generation of abstract painters, including Cecily Brown, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, Katy Moran, Amy Sillman, and Melissa Meyer. The present exhibition focuses on only a decade or so of Godwin’s long career, which spans some fifty years. In 1950, for her first solo show, which took place in her hometown of Suffolk,Virginia, Godwin produced a remarkable series of medium-sized canvases (averaging about 2½ by 3 feet). Using bold brushwork, aggressive line, and audacious color, these pictures suggest shallow architectural spaces in which irregular geometric forms collide. The compositions also indicate a frantic yet wellchoreographed sense of movement. It is not surprising to learn that early on in her career she was directly influenced by Martha Graham. The dancer/choreographer gave a performance in 1950 at Mary Baldwin College, where the precocious Godwin was still a student. The two met and became longtime friends. Godwin acknowledges Graham’s work as key to her own.

“I can see her gestures in everything I do,” the artist maintains today.2 Some of Godwin’s paintings make direct reference to the dancer, such as Martha Graham—Lamentation (1956), with its vigorous and inherently dramatic brushwork in blue and black against white. Even in a work such as Woman (1954), the black lines and sweeping passages of white and pale yellow seem to refer to a dancer in costume flying gracefully across a stage as much as to de Kooning’s famous painting with the same title, painted two years before. Godwin’s early work adheres to the temperament of the New York School in many crucial ways. Despite her claim that she was not at the time aware of the painters of European Art Informel of the 1940s and 50s, her compositions correspond rather nicely to certain works by Alberto Magnelli, Stanley William Hayter, Pierre Soulages, and others. Godwin’s Nucleus (1950) focuses on an oval shape in green at center right. Enveloped by a lighter green shell, the oval resembles the core of a bisected avocado. Ensconced in a network of orange-red and yellow lines, the “nucleus” is the keystone to the composition’s overall cellular structure. Similar in its sense of movement, Nucleus II (1950) features sweeping chevron shapes in red and ochre, outlined in some places by dark green and black. In these canvases, as in much of Godwin’s later output, including the vibrant works she has produced in recent years, the colliding and cascading forms create a palpable tension. Nucleus IV (1950) bears an explicit sensual motion, with rounded forms suggesting breasts, buttocks, and arms, as if a nude model were shifting a pose. As in many of her works, the composition hints at body movement, or more specifically, dance. Echoes I (1954) concentrates on rounded forms in blues and grays contrasted with

3.

G R E E N M O U N TA I N

1960

O I L O N C A N VA S

49 x 52 IN.

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brilliant red-orange straight lines. Prominent among these is a bright red E on the upper left, which may refer to the first letter of the painting’s title, as it also punctuates and contains the implied movement. In these early efforts, Godwin demonstrates an assured use of the vocabulary of the avant-garde, that is to say, of Abstract Expressionism, well before her move to New York City in 1953. She found the city’s esthetic and intellectual environment stimulating, and she soon befriended a number of likeminded contemporaries, including Franz Kline, James Brooks, and Kenzo Okada. As a woman working in the hyper-macho milieu of the New York art scene of the 1950s, she often felt socially and emotionally isolated. As art historian Norman L. Kleeblatt observes in his insightful catalogue essay for Action/Abstraction, a traveling museum show [held May–September 2008] at the Jewish Museum in New York, fall 2008 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and [winter–spring 2009 at] the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, “Paradoxically, although Abstract Expressionism has long been known as a movement that incorporated a great number of outsiders, certain outsiders continued to be marginalized. The favored outsiders were . . . white, heterosexual men of European or Western Asian origin. The history of the past twentyfive years tells a different story, focusing as well on the achievements of women, African Americans, and homosexuals. These and others with marginalized identities were often written out of the critical discussions as the emerging canon was being formed.”3 Remaining totally focused on her work, Godwin attended the Art Students League, studying under Vaclav Vytacil before joining the Hans Hofmann School. Reflecting her time with Hofmann, Yellow Figure (1953) suggests by means of heightened color and thick impasto an architectonic space. A soaring yellow-and-white totem-like form in the center is bolstered by two diagonal red-orange lines that span the height of the canvas on either side of the totem. The predominately brilliant yellow Parrot of the same year could be study of a bird, with the curving red forms and dashes of broken orange-red lines indicating elaborate plumes. In vivacious works such as Indian and The Chief (both 1953), heavy impasto of red and blue punctuates each composition. These marks seem to refer to the rich plumage of the ceremonial garb of a Native American shaman. Later in the 1950s, Godwin’s brushwork became considerably looser; she experimented with pours and stains in expansive canvases such as Abstraction

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(1954) and Ode to Kenzo (1955). The contemplative tone of these works reflects her growing interest in Zen Buddhism. The compositions manage to convey the ethereal and to some extent hint at a spiritual stance. Godwin, however, always retains a sense of the physical body and of human presence in the work. The sweeping gestures and human scale of the canvases constantly refer to the body’s movement and to an idealized but unmistakably earthly realm. Godwin achieved considerable success in this period, showing her works regularly at prestigious New York City venues, such as the Stable Gallery and Betty Parsons. She was the youngest woman ever to show at Parsons. Later in the 1950s, with a newfound confidence, Godwin tackled very large canvases, up to eight feet tall. Full of muscular brushwork and adventurous color relationships, monumental compositions such as Divisions (1955), Into the Depth (1957), and Longing (1958) resulted from robust physical and intellectual rigor in equal measure, a combination rarely associated with women painters at the time. Lyrical refinement is also there, in the dark massive forms indicating the landscape elements in Purple Mountain (1957) and in the massive architectonic shapes of Black Support (1960). In these dynamic works, Godwin had arrived at a personal visual vocabulary, one that is brooding in its intellectual depth yet eternally uplifting in its insistence on physical prowess and emotional strength.

1. Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, 1969), 137. 2. Judith Godwin, conversation with author, March 2008. 3. Norman L. Keeblatt, “Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Postwar American Art,” in Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976 (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2008), 145.

4.

BLACK CLOUD

1960

O I L O N C A N VA S

52 x 58 IN.

11

The act of painting is for me, as a woman, an act of freedom, and a realization that an image generated by the female experience can be a powerful and creative expression for all humanity. My paintings are personal statements—extensions of myself. I take a truth, an intimate emotion, a question, an answer—and paint it. It is natural for me to meditate on reality rather than on the romantic, and yet my work often results in a mixture of both. —Judith Godwin, statement made for

Celebration of Women in the Arts (Northern Michigan University, 1978).

5.

12

CRUSADE

1977

O I L O N C A N VA S

5 2 x 9 0 I N . ( C O V E R D E TA I L )

13

[Judith Godwin] entered the New York art scene at a time when the classic period of the New York School was at its apex, shining its brightest light immediately prior to exploding into a multitude of contradictory isms, each trying to nail down its part of the elephant and all a direct reaction to and/or against Abstract Expressionism. Pop, Op, and Color Field begat Photo-Realism, Conceptualism, Minimalism, and Site-Specific (Earth) art. The polemicists of each trend sought to negate everything that had preceded it, until at 186,000 revolutions per second the barriers of space and time were broken and we arrived, and remain, at a point where anything goes. The “Post-Modern” artist is a time traveler, reliving some aspect or other of Modernism that was explored prior to 1920, but is now covered by a knowing veneer of irony and cultural conditioning. How does Judith Godwin fit into all this? Quite simply, she is at once of it and apart from it. She came out of a completely different regional and social background from most of the New York artists, whose work provided her with initial inspiration. Further, she was younger and, of course, a woman in a field dominated by macho individuals who were churning out their creations in a mighty Hemmingwayish spasm of self-destructive psychic purgation, each making a valiant but doomed statement in the face of an indifferent, even hostile, cosmos. Judith Godwin’s cosmic view seems quite different, emerging as it has from a background of Southern gentility, historic preservation, and perhaps most significant, an interest in gardening. The essentially cyclic view of the universe that comes from planting and nurturing a garden made the artist most amenable to the even larger cycles of characteristic of Asian thought, particularly Buddhism and its offshoot, the “way of liberation” known as Zen. 6.

TROPIC ZONE

1978

O I L O N C A N VA S

42 x 52 IN.

—Mark Morey, Judith Godwin: An Artist

Out of Time, exh. cat. (Amarillo Museum of Art, Texas, 1995).

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15

Of the paintings you [sent] I feel that my favorites are Abstraction 1954 and Abstraction #15, 1955. In the former I like the structure[d] organization of planes you achieved without sacrificing spontaneity. The linear emphases seem to organize very subtly with the variations in the palette employed. There seem no loose strands, no over emphasis. I find the total a very satisfying unity. In Abstraction #15 I was particularly struck by the color handling and the freshness of color in keeping with the freedom of form description and spontaneity of brushwork. —James Johnson Sweeney letter to Judith Godwin, 57 Jane St., New York 14, Feb. 18, 1956. Quoted in Ann Gibson, “Judith Godwin and the New York School,” in Judith Godwin:

Style and Grace, exh. cat. (Roanoke: Art Museum of Western Virginia, 1997), 13.

7.

16

REFLECTIONS

1979

O I L O N C A N VA S

5 0 7⁄ 8 x 7 2 1⁄ 8 I N .

17

Godwin’s art expands the possibilities for human perception of experience. The energetic surfaces of the paintings—colors, planes, textures with intricate relationships—act as springboards for the viewer’s own experience. She melds a profound understanding of the power of the physical materiality of paint with Zen concepts of unity and spontaneity. There is a subtlety to the process that is similar to the truth-revealing, contemplative experience of Zen. —Joanne Kuebler, “Acknowledgments,” Judith Godwin: Style and

Grace, exh. cat. (Roanoke, Va.: Art Museum of Western Virginia, 1997), 7.

8.

18

INFIDEL

1979

A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S

50 x 50 IN.

19

9.

HARLEM

1981

O I L O N C A N VA S

46 x 50 IN.

10 .

20

P U R P L E R AV E N

1984

O I L O N C A N VA S

5 4 1⁄ 16 x 5 0 1⁄ 16 I N .

21

Emerging from the sixties—not unscathed, but tempered, one could say—Godwin plunged into the seventies with the realization that the language of Abstract Expressionism she had forged in the fifties would serve her purposes; her work gained in conviction, complexity, and force. By the eighties, in paintings such as

Occident (1982), she was using some of the most assertive color combinations of her career. The zig-zag forms she had noted in Native American art in the forties (reinforced, perhaps, by similar forms that flashed in her retinal field of vision during migraine headaches) reappeared in paintings such as Purple Raven (1985), Twilight (1987), Nebulae (1993), and Nocturnal Odyssey (1995). In the later eighties another development became perceptible. Godwin was most emphatically integrating the supposedly binary poles of structure and decoration. She employed stenciled applications, usually of petal-like forms in paintings such as Harlem (1981) and To Kenzo (1982), and paper collage, in works such as Nebulae, and Orbit (both 1993). In Twilight and Orbit as well as Nebulae, pastel colors reemerged, together . . . with metallic paints: silver and gold [in Twilight]. —Ann Gibson, “Judith Godwin and the New York School,” in Judith Godwin: Style and Grace, exh. cat. (Roanoke: Art Museum of Western Virginia, 1997), 25.

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CAPRICORN

1990

O I L O N C A N VA S

6 2 x 1 0 4 1⁄ 2 I N .

23

12 .

24

POLAR NIGHT

1994

B R I S T L E B R U S H A N D O I L O N C A N VA S

52 x 72 IN.

13 .

SIROCCO

1992

O I L O N C A N VA S

64 x 90 IN.

25

14 .

C A R N I VA L E

1994

O I L O N C A N VA S

30 x 36 IN.

15 .

26

DESERT KAHN

1995

O I L O N C A N VA S

66 x 54 IN.

27

In her latest works, especially, inventive and active forms are not merely served by Godwin’s adept integration of color and texture. Form and substance, style and grace, idea and its materialization are not polarized (or hierarchized) as they were in the country of her aesthetic birth— Abstract Expressionism—but together form a kind of “flesh,” in which the service of colored material to the structure of form, and conversely, of form to color and material oscillates in mutual support. — Ann Gibson, “Judith Godwin and the New York School,” in Judith Godwin: Style and Grace, exh. cat. (Roanoke: Art Museum of Western Virginia, 1997), 27-28.

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16 .

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PA R F A I T

2000

O I L O N C A N VA S

BLUE NO. II

1997

B R I S T L E B R U S H A N D O I L O N C A N VA S

1 6 x 2 3 1⁄ 2 I N .

12 x 12 IN.

29

18 .

30

DIPTYCH

2002

O I L O N C A N VA S

5 2 x 8 4 1⁄ 4 I N .

31

CHECKLIST OF THE EXHIBITION

1960 (Cat. 4) Oil on canvas, 52 ⳯ 58 inches Signed lower right: Godwin Signed and inscribed on verso: JW Godwin 52⬙ x 58 ⬙ B L AC K C L O U D

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

1979 (Cat. 8) Acrylic on canvas, 50 ⳯ 50 inches Signed lower right: Godwin Signed, dated, and inscribed on verso: 1979 50 x 50 Judith Godwin “Infidel” 1979 / acrylic

BLACK CLOUD

INFIDEL

1997 (Cat. 17) Bristle brush and oil on canvas 16 ⳯ 23½ inches Signed lower right: Godwin Signed, dated, and inscribed on stretcher: Godwin “Blue no II” “Blue No. II” 1997 / Godwin

2000 (Cat. 16) Oil on canvas, 12 ⳯ 12 inches Signed lower left: Godwin Signed, dated, and inscribed on stretcher: Godwin “Parfait” / 2000

BLUE NO. II

1990 (Cat. 11) Oil on canvas, 62 ⳯ 104½ inches Signed upper left: Godwin CAPRICORN

1994 (Cat. 14) Oil on canvas, 30 ⳯ 36 inches Signed upper right: Godwin Signed and inscribed on stretcher: Godwin “Carnivale”

PA R F A I T

P I N K S K Y P O N D 1960 (Cat. 2) Acrylic on canvas, 24 ⳯ 36 inches Signed lower right: Godwin Signed and inscribed on stretcher: Godwin 24 x 36 P I N K S K Y P O N D

C A R N I VA L E

C R U S A D E 1977 (Cat. 5, Cover) Oil on canvas, 52 ⳯ 90 inches Signed lower left: Godwin

1995 (Cat. 15) Oil on canvas, 66 ⳯ 54 inches Signed lower left: Godwin DESERT KAHN

2002 (Cat. 18) Oil on canvas, 52 ⳯ 84¼ inches Signed lower center: Godwin Inscribed on verso: Top Left 2 Panels 52⬙ x 84½ ⬙; Top Right 2 Panels 52⬙ x 84½ ⬙ DIPTYCH

1954 (Cat. 1) Oil on canvas, 40¾ ⳯ 30 inches Signed on verso: Judith Godwin Signed, dated, and inscribed on stretcher: Godwin Echos, no. 2 1954 Godwin ECHOES, NO. 2

1960 (Cat. 3) Oil on canvas, 49 ⳯ 52 inches Signed, dated, and inscribed on stretcher: Green Mountain / 1960 JW Godwin G R E E N M O U N TA I N

H A R L E M 1981 (Cat. 9) Oil on canvas, 46 ⳯ 50 inches Signed upper left: Godwin Dated and inscribed on stretcher: “Harlem” / 1981

32

P O L A R N I G H T 1994 (Cat. 12) Bristle brush and oil on canvas, 52 ⳯ 72 inches Signed, dated, and inscribed on verso: Godwin “P O L A R N I G H T ” 52 x 72 1994 / P O L A R N I G H T 1994

1984 (Cat. 10) Oil on canvas, 541⁄16 ⳯ 501⁄16 inches Signed lower left: Godwin Signed and inscribed on stretcher: Godwin Purple Raven 54 x 50 Signed, dated, and inscribed on label affixed to verso: Godwin / 1984 / Purple Raven P U R P L E R AV E N

R E F L E C T I O N S 1979 (Cat. 7) Oil on canvas, 50⅞ ⳯ 72⅛ inches Signed lower left: Godwin Signed on stretcher: Godwin Signed, dated, and inscribed on label affixed to verso: Godwin / “Reflections” / 50⅞ x 72¼ / 1979

1992 (Cat. 13) Oil on canvas, 64 ⳯ 90 inches Signed lower left: Godwin Signed on verso: Godwin SIROCCO

T R O P I C Z O N E 1978 (Cat. 6) Oil on canvas, 42 ⳯ 52 inches Signed upper left: Godwin

Amarillo Museum of Art, Texas Anderson Gallery,Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond Art Institute of Chicago Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York Gannett Center, Columbia University, New York General Electric Company, New York Greenville County Museum, South Carolina Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. JPMorgan Chase, New York Mary Baldwin College, Staunton,Virginia McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Milwaukee Art Museum Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art, New York National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, South Wales, United Kingdom National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Newark Museum, New Jersey North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Smith College Museum of Art, Southampton, Massachusetts Sovran Bank, Richmond,Virginia Suffolk Museum of Art,Virginia Ulrich Museum, Wichita State University, Kansas United States Navy Y.M.C.A., Norfolk,Virginia United Virginia Bank, Richmond University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

Judith Godwin at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1959, with Moon