Excerpt from Judith Godwin: In Her Own Idiom
By Jessica Holmes
Over the course of her long career, Judith Godwin (1930–2021) built a distinct painterly language that came fully into its own in the decades after the 1970s. Her career resists the neat arc of mid-century art-world ascent and decline. As a result, the mythology of her early New York years has often stood in for the whole of her achievement, yet it was in the decades that followed that she produced so much of the work that defines her legacy. Operating between the inherited codes of her Southern upbringing and restless New York modernism, Godwin did not declare her independence so much as build it, stroke by stroke, into the surface of her canvases. If her biography resists easy narration, her canvases do not; they chart, with increasing assurance, the evolution of a vocabulary forged between competing worlds.
Of her multi-decade career, the one whose territory has most often been covered is that of the 1950s, when Godwin was just starting out as a young artist in New York. It was in these early New York years, when her star seemed in ascension, that the recognized Godwin lore took shape, and eventually, became shorthand for much of her career as a whole. Though her paintings of the 1950s are indisputably perceptive and sophisticated, dwelling there ultimately discounts the incredible strides she made in her work in the 1970s and onward right up until her death. In particular, the 1970s–1990s were especially fertile, replete with experimentation and a maturation of her practice. It was in this period that Godwin searched for, found, and developed a phraseology of freedom through paint.
