Judith Godwin

Judith Godwin
Seated Figure, 1955
Oil on canvas
83 x 47 inches
Collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Berry Campbell at Intersect Aspen:
Women of Abstract Expressionism
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WHEN THE ARTIST Judith Godwin died on May 29 in her ninety-second year, the art world lost the last living member of a generation of women Abstract Expressionists, a group of artists largely overlooked in favor of their male peers. I lost a dear friend. 

My connection with Judith came about through our mutual friend Julie Lawson, a London art-world personality and assistant to Sir Roland Penrose, one of the founders of the city’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Years later, when I was living in New York, Julie introduced me to Judith, who struck me as a delightful and irreverent Southern lady. What I didn’t recognize at first was how strong a character she was under that lighthearted gentility. At the time, she was celebrating her victory in a court case against a restaurant that was encroaching on her Greenwich Village property. There, in her beautifully tended garden, resplendent with plants she had known and loved in Virginia—including fine camellias and an extraordinary Lady Banks climbing rose—Franz Kline and Ruth Kligman’s cat was a constant presence (they lived nearby). Judith said she was in the habit of giving Kligman a sandwich whenever she stopped by to fetch the animal. Judith also said she had learned a great deal from Kline, especially his late works in color.

Judith was born in 1930 in Suffolk, Virginia, into a distinguished family tracing ancestors back to the state’s first colonial settlers. This was a background she mostly rejected, leaving Virginia after graduating from Mary Baldwin College and what is now Virginia Commonwealth University to become an artist.

With the reluctant blessing of her parents, she moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League and later with Hans Hoffmann at his School of Fine Arts and struggled to establish herself. In addition to being a dedicated painter, Judith, to earn a living, had to learn carpentry, stonemasonry, plastering, interior decoration, and landscaping. She was always a welcome and helpful guest in my home, walking around, tools in hand, checking fittings and hinges. In her studio on West Thirteenth Street, she stretched her own canvases and made the frames for her paintings, which were stacked in partitions she constructed and installed. Independence, improvisation, and self-reliance were fundamental to her character.

Judith often spoke to me of the opportunities she had missed as a woman in New York’s 1950s and ’60s art world. She never felt welcome at the Cedar Tavern, that fabled AbEx stomping ground. Once, at a gallery opening early in her career, she was abruptly sidelined by Ellsworth Kelly while trying to speak to Betty Parsons. However, in 1957, she was in the inaugural Betty Parsons Section Eleven Gallery show, and a year later in a group show at Stable Gallery. She went on to be represented by Marisa del Re Gallery, Spanierman Gallery, and, most recently, Berry Campbell Gallery. Her powerful gestural abstractions are in many private collections and have been acquired by the nation’s leading contemporary-art museums.

Still, it always rankled her that her paintings weren’t more widely known or appreciated, especially in comparison to those of her male contemporaries. But she gained recognition for her place in the canon in 2016 with the Denver Art Museum’s groundbreaking “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” which highlighted twelve women artists, Judith among them. It pleased her to know that a major reassessment of her work and life had begun—and now it will be ongoing.

Anthony Korner is publisher of Artforum.

We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Judith Godwin (1930 - 2021). Godwin was an innovative artist, who fought hard for her well-deserved place in the male dominated world of Abstract Expressionism. A painter for over seventy years, collectors, curators, and museums increasingly have acknowledged Godwin’s achievements in the past five years. She was among twelve artists included in the groundbreaking exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, held at the Denver Art Museum, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. Included in numerous major museum collections, recently her works have been acquired by countless museums such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Mougins Museum of Classical Art, France; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and the Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska, among many others. Godwin was a playful raconteur and a passionate advocate for women in the arts. We feel fortunate to have worked closely with Judith Godwin for over ten years, and we will miss her sharp wit, her friendship, and her boundless energy and creativity.

Artist's Choice: Interconnected
May 7 - June 7, 2020
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Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Artist’s Choice: Interconnected, an exclusive online exhibition of works from gallery’s inventory chosen by Berry Campbell’s represented contemporary artists. Eric Dever, Judith Godwin, Ken Greenleaf, Jill Nathanson, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, and Frank Wimberley have thoughtfully selected one work from our gallery inventory that they associate with their own creative process and artistic journey. This artist-curated exhibition is an inquiry into the lines of influence and connections within our Berry Campbell artist community. Artist’s Choice: Interconnected launches digitally May 7, 2020.

The choices are sometimes expected, and at other times, surprising.  Some artists were inspired by a painting from an artist they had never met, and others paid tribute to old friends or mentors.  Judith Godwin recalls good times with her old friend and art dealer, Betty Parsons.  James Walsh remembers a painting by Walter Darby Bannard from a 1981 show at Knoedler Gallery.  Mike Solomon pays homage to the perseverance of abstract painter and dear friend, Frank Wimberley saying: “The quiet intermingling of his experience, with the purity of painting, gives his abstractions an authenticity and delicacy that is profound to witness.”  Ken Greenleaf favorite is Cloistered #5 (1968) by Ida Kohlmeyer, delighting in the pure abstraction.  Jill Nathanson picked a color-field forerunner, Dan Christensen.  Ann Purcell admitted to being picky but found true inspiration after visiting our Yvonne Thomas show repeatedly.  Eric Dever ruminates about Charlotte Park: “Like a favorite poem, novel or even film, a painting can be a touchstone, something one returns to with certain regularity; perhaps a gauge of some kind, beginning with personal happiness on the occasion of discovery and new revelation as our lives unfold.”  Joyce Weinstein finds parallels with John Opper.  Susan Vecsey loves the “stillness and movement” of Elaine de Kooning’s Six Horses, Blue Wall (1987).  No coincidence that Vecsey lives down the road from the Elaine de Kooning house in the Hamptons. Frank Wimberley recalls of Herman Cherry: “He was one of the East End artists who wished to me to succeed.”

ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL
Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have many parallels in their backgrounds and interests. Both studied art history in college, began their careers in the museum world, and later worked together at a major gallery in midtown Manhattan. Most importantly, however, Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision.

Both art dealers developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars during their art world years. They decided to work together, opening Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013 in the heart of New York's Chelsea art district, at 530 West 24th Street on the ground floor. In 2015, the gallery expanded, doubling its size with an additional 2,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Highlighting a selection of postwar and contemporary artists, the gallery fulfills an important gap in the art world, revealing a depth within American modernism that is just beginning to be understood, encompassing the many artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography-beyond such legendary figures as Pollock and de Kooning. Since its inception, the gallery has been especially instrumental in giving women artists long overdue consideration, an effort that museums have only just begun to take up, such as in the 2016 traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. This show featured work by Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, both represented by Berry Campbell, along with that of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. In 2019, Berry Campbell's exhibition, Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (Paintings 1963 - 1965) was reviewed by Roberta Smith for the New York Times, in which Smith wrote that Thomas, "... kept her hand in, adding a fresh directness of touch, and the results give her a place in the still-emerging saga of postwar American abstraction.”

In addition to Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, artists whose work is represented by the gallery include Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, John Goodyear, Ken Greenleaf, Raymond Hendler, Ida Kohlmeyer, Jill Nathanson, John Opper, Stephen Pace, Charlotte Park, William Perehudoff, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Albert Stadler, Yvonne Thomas, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, Frank Wimberley, Larry Zox, and Edward Zutrau. The gallery has helped promote many of these artists' careers in museum shows including that of Bannard at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018-19); Syd Solomon, in a traveling museum show which culminates at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota and has been extended through 2021; Stephen Pace at The McCutchan Art Center/Pace Galleries at the University of Southern Indiana (2018) and at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2019); and Vecsey and Mike Solomon at the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina (2017 and 2019, respectively); and Eric Dever at the Suffolk Community College, Riverhead, New York (2020). In an April 3, 2020 New York Times review of Berry Campbell's exhibition of Ida Kohlmeyer's Cloistered paintings, Roberta Smith stated: “These paintings stunningly sum up a moment when Minimalism was giving way to or being complicated by something more emotionally challenging and implicitly feminine and feminist. They could hang in any museum.”

Collaboration is an important aspect of the gallery. With the widened inquiries and understandings that have resulted from their ongoing discussions about the art world canon, the dealers feel a continual sense of excitement in the discoveries of artists and research still to be made.

Berry Campbell is located in the heart of the Chelsea Arts District at 530 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10011.  For further information, contact us at 212.924.2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.

Berry Campbell Celebrates Women's History Month

Ida Kohlmeyer
VIDEO: Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough

Women of Abstract Expressionism 
Inventory Highlights
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Ann Purcell
Upcoming Exhibition: Kali Poems
View Works by Ann Purcell

Judith Godwin
Forbes Magazine: Add to Your list of '5 Women Artists' at These Museums Around The United States
by Chadd Scott

Charlotte Park
Client Testimonial: 
"Extremely gratifying to see Paul Kasmin Gallery's eye-opening summer show, Painters of the East End reviewed by Erin Kimmel in this month's Art in America . And smiled extra wide that AbEx talent Charlotte Park is written up in the same paragraph as — and holds her own with— Joan Mitchell. 'Park's virtuosic oil and crayon compositions (ca. 1965 and 1967) feature dendrite-like configurations in a palette of bright pinks, yellows and blues that appear frozen mid twist.' Ten years ago Christine Berry, owner of one of the most engaging and provocative galleries in Chelsea, Berry Campbell, thankfully introduced me to the work of Charlotte Park, who died in 2010 at age 92 in Montauk, where she lived and painted. She was the wife of artist James Brooks, supporting his career at the expense of her own, and dear friends and neighbors of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner." 
-Adam Beckerman
View Works by Charlotte Park 

Yvonne Thomas
Eazel Interactive Exhibition | Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (1963-1965) 

Susan Vecsey
blue. 
Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York
View Works by Susan Vecsey

Jill Nathanson
LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of New York
Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson 

Perle Fine
What We See, How We See
Through April 2021
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
View Works by Perle Fine

Joyce Weinstein
Postwar Women
Curated by William Corwin
The Art Students League, New York
View Works by Joyce Weinstein