When Judith Godwin moved to New York in 1953, making abstract paintings was still risky, both professionally and personally. The measure of serious abstraction had only recently been established by first-generation Abstract Expressionists. If the younger artists who emulated them did not fully grasp the relationship between formal strategies and feeling, then their work would merely standardize Abstract Expressionism’s stylistic features. When genuine spontaneity was replaced by what Clement Greenberg called the “Tenth Street touch,” the insidious effect was to weaken the audience’s, and the