Born in Grand Haven, Michigan, in 1880 Judson Smith received his first art training at the Detroit Academy of Fine Arts. Soon he was in New York (age 18) studying with John La Forge, John Twachtman and Kenyon Cox. He returned to Detroit as a trained muralist and executed important commissions in churches, theatres, and most impressively five murals in the Detroit Free Press Building.
In 1921 after a European trip studying the old masters he moved with his family to Woodstock. I remember his daughter Gretchen Mount and her sister “Mary D.” describing the day Konrad Cramer arrived with his family. The two clans joined in a heady celebration. Woodstock was the place to be. That same year (1922) he joined modernists Andrew Dasburg and Henry Lee McFee along with Charles Rosen teaching at the Woodstock School.
In 1930 Smith started his own school (in his barns on Ohayo Mountain Road) with a faculty that included Conrad Kramer, Yasou Kunioshi, Henry Mattson and sculptor Warren Wheelock. These young artists absorbed the influence of new waves of ideas, techniques and philosophies brought to American shores from Europe – Cézanne, Cubism, The Blu Reider School, et al. Together they re-interpreted the traditional forms of landscape, figure and still life with new vitality. Fractured, prismatic views of reality, flattened picture planes, dissolving forms, geometric composition and volumetric modeling were added to their artistic vocabulary.
After World War II Smith began to embrace pure abstraction. He worked in grid like patterns, using broad brush strokes with a minimalist’s attention to the shallow picture plane. Judson Smith was in his seventies when he wrote Random Thoughts on Non Objective Painting an Essay published by Crown Publishers.
This superb study of the female nude demonstrates Smith’s adept handling of all the modernist tendencies in his art. It is cubist in structure, monumental in form and executed in a symphony of Cézanne inspired color. –JC