Judith Hudson
The dining table with its heavy tiles is by Judith’s friend Julian Schnabel; the surrounding chairs are covered in bright ethnic fabrics. On the left, a painting by Philip Taafe above a watercolor by Eric Fischl and, bottom, a watercolor by Judith. Mounted butterflies hang by the window, and above the bookshelves are a drawing by Judith Linhares and a photograph by Laurie Simmons.
Judith Hudson’s apartment wears its heart on its sleeve and it beats to the march of a different drummer, one given to joy and melancholy.
To step out of out of the elevator straight into her hall is to find oneself in the midst of a slice through New York contemporary art life as it is being lived now. You’re also in the home of someone who lives intensely, and it has an air of acute personal reminiscence. I’m reminded of Sylvia Plath in a way – “as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.”
Judith’s heart/face is in the way she has pulled together this big blank apartment and made it into a light-filled web of autobiographical, cultural and political images, and works from the collective imagination of her friends.
She is a painter and she lives alone; her life and work are a continuum here on the eleventh floor of a business-looking apartment block in a vast white apartment in midtown, bang in Murray Hill near Park Avenue.
Her studio is within the apartment and her work is in evidence on the walls. Her distinct and fierce personality stamps every drawing and paintings. When she fixes her gaze upon her daily life as her subject for her work, she brings before us not only its surface, beautifully observed with a kind of dreamy liquidity, but also its hidden depths: a girl putting on lipstick, or pulling up her pants, the thighs a landscape somehow conveying a sense of the world’s unreliability. Sometimes there is raw identification in her work. In her big workaday studio, stuff is always at hand. Paints and brushes in their jars on a paint-spattered cloth make for a wonderful still life, eloquent with possibility.
Near the kitchen is a self-portrait called simply Sad. It is. Unconsoled clarity. But she can be funny and light-hearted and with powerful sureness take a leap into hilarity – as in her depiction of donkeys rolling on their backs in an ecstasy of scratching, on her rugs on the floor designed for a show she did based on a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Before she moved here she lived a domestic life with her family. “I had been living in a beautiful house with my husband and children in Gramercy Park. We had a lot of fun in that house. But there was the divorce and I started looking like crazy for something. I wanted to stay in Manhattan so I looked at houses in different places in the city. I’ve always loved the idea of islands – life on an island is so intense, rich and concentrated. And I’m a water baby. I wanted to look out on the water. So I looked at places on the river and almost bought a place right over on the West Side Highway looking out at the Hudson – but there was way too much traffic there.”
She had visited the apartment when it belonged to musician Peter Duchin and his wife, actor and writer Brooke Hayward –but without a thought that she would ever live there. “I was on a weekend in the country and Peter was also staying; I told him that I was looking for somewhere good to live and he said ‘I’m selling my place.’ So I came and I saw and I said OK, I’ll take it.” And that was that. In 2012.
She set about transforming her changed life into a new awareness – not just metaphysically but in the physical sphere too. She reconfigured the apartment, opening up the space so it flows through room to room; the sheer stretch of it suits her generous, free-ranging temperament. The walls are all white, background for the paintings, though they were anything but white when she bought the apartment. She remembers how it was with amusement: “The big living room was full of all kinds of crazy decoration: wallpapered and painted and festooned, with hundreds of sconces and pompons hanging all over the place. It looked great, especially at night . . . But I needed a tabula rasa and I knew that I could start over here, in what was a great space – 3,000 square feet, both to live in and to give parties. And as well it was in a great place, right in midtown.”
When you visit someone’s home for the first time you can be a bit confounded. How true – or not – is the saying Tel le logis, tel le maître – “Tell me how your house looks and I’ll tell you who you are”? Does the external manifestation of how he or she lives correspond to the actual person? Judith’s place is filled with the strength of her engagement with art. It also reflects her vividness, her quickness, her way of straining at some leash as though wanting to be let into the wild.
It’s also filled with work, pictures and objects, from her friends, work that is often beautiful and strange. Among them are pieces by Terry Winters, Peter Saul, James Nares, Donald Baechler, Jill Levine, Richard Hennessy, rugs by Steve Gianakos and a John Newman sculpture. A monumental black and white self-portrait of the artist Philip Guston in his studio hangs near a Francesco Clemente watercolor, a glass work by Rob Wynne and a shadow piece by Mac Adams, a British artist who makes complex and perplexing structures that are wonderful in themselves and under certain light conditions cast a figurative shadow of a vexingly realistic animal. In this case a very cat-like cat.
The list could go on . . . and on . . . an impossibly intricate cut paper sculpture made from a jotter by the artist Sarah Sze; a painting by Albert Jensen; a Doll’s Feet photograph by Laurie Simmons; a painting by Jane Rosenblum called, with typical chutzpah, These Monkeys are Fags; a photograph, After Manet: Olympia, by the art photographer Ralph Gibson; a hanging golden ball by John Torreano. (Oh, and some dried flowers that look like something you might come across in a Neapolitan cemetery.) All grist to Judith’s mill.
Mario Praz wrote about the ideal room as “a mould of the spirit, the case without which the soul would feel like a snail without a shell.” Judith’s mold, her multi-layered shell, is absorbing and, for me, educative, but it’s also comfortable and practical, a good place to live in, an easy place to have an adventurous visual journey in – and it’s electrifyingly vivid with color. She has a fabulous eye for color – the blue on her bathroom walls is celestial, and although the main rooms are that blank white, when you walk out of that elevator straight through her doors one meets a concatenation of rainbows. Immediately opposite a big colorful painting by Stephen Mueller springs out at you; a purple toy on a buttoned yellow sofa is like something van Gogh could have painted.
This beautiful table, made by Judith, is a glass-covered collection of butterflies, moths, jewelled beetles and other entomological specimens.
A violent giant on the wall, a big black and white painting in charcoal, is by Robert Longo from a 1970s series called Men in the City. Hovering over it all like a UFO from a sci-fi film is “Flotation,” a light by the German designer Ingo Maurer. A broom propped in a corner is a musical instrument bought from Judith’s daughter Genevieve Hudson Price’s pop-up gallery.
Two of the most beautiful things in the whole place are under glass-covered tables and made by Judith: one – in Emily Dickinson’s phrase a little “Meadow of Majesty” – is a collection of mounted lepidoptera, full of the utter decadent luxury of the wings of butterflies, moths, jewelled bugs. It is both savage and beguiling. The other, a curious and exquisite object, is a spider’s web transferred intact on to a backing and fixed under glass, the most ephemeral of things made solid,
She has scooped up the many and various chairs from all over; covered in ethnic fabrics, their colors are heartening. The tiled dining table is by her close friend Julian Schnabel. Her bedcover is an old drop cloth with colored lines and drips of paints – “I thought it was so beautiful – I embellished it.”
But the interior, great as it is, is matched by what’s outside. Not just spectacular views – though of course there they are, just being kept at bay by her nineteen tall and wide windows. And because light streams into her rooms and they are alive with any-angled light and color, they have the look of stilled air, silver as water in a glass. Outside, the luminously peopled skyscrapers have conversations with each other in the sky. At night the outside appears to be caught up in an exuberant dance; airplanes streak through the sky, helicopters chunter along, the moon tries to put in an appearance, a gallimaufry of sparkle and alternative facts to dawn. Touching heaven.
Looking across the shining floor from the bright dining/kitchen area to the even more light-filled living room, a Jill Levine sculpture hangs on the wall, and the sculpture in Plexiglas is by British artist Mac Adams; beyond are two paintings, one blue, one yellow, by James Nares. On the windowsill are a Cambodian reclining figure and a curved red sculpture by John Newman.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP On the far wall of the living room are a Philip Guston drawing, and a big canvas – Pandora and the Flying Dutchman – by Julian Schnabel; on the long wall, work by Judith and the many artists who are her friends. Doors into the hallway between the dining/kitchen area and the living room open on to a view of a large painting by Stephen Mueller, with another butterfly collection above. Paints and brushes in their jars on a paint-spattered cloth in Judith’s studio make for a wonderful still life.