Henry Hudson

The sixth plate in The Rise and Fall of Young Sen depicts the aftermath of a party that has taken place at Young Sen and Roberta’s apartment in New York. Several people can be seen in different states of indulgent dissoluteness, lying astray on the sofas and unaware that Roberta has just entered the house. Sen sits on a chair to the right of the composition, in a compromising position with another man. His phone, lying by his foot, has a text from Daniel, his lover from London with whom he is still romantically involved. The floor is strewn with waste; alcoholic beverages, half-eaten food, remnants of drugs and other garbage. These are the consequences of a night of debauchery and excess after a private view, now that Young Sen is fully part of the New York art scene.

The couple live in an apartment in Chelsea, have a son together, and are themselves art collectors. However, in the course of the night several of the works in the collection have been damaged; both a canvas by Keith Coventry and a portrait by George Condo have been vandalised, and a dollar sign by Tim Noble and Sue Webster is resting against a column towards the back of the room, broken. The only work that seems to have escaped the consequences of The After Party is a mobile by Alexander Calder that hangs elegantly from the ceiling. Outside, in the terrace area is Marc Quinn’s work The Scream from 2010, which can only be seen partially as it has been placed in a Louis Vuitton trunk. The present scene replicates William Hogarth’s The Orgy that sees Tom Rakewell in a similar act of self-indulgence. A further, hidden reference to Hogarth’s work lies in an object that Husdon has placed in the terrace, beside the Luis Vuitton trunk with Marc Quinn’s sculpture. A small glass construction in the shape of a triangle containing a serpentine line alludes to Hogarth’s ideas about beauty, about which he wrote his book The Analysis of Beauty in 1753. In his book, Hogarth described how what he called the ‘Line of Beauty’ – an s-shaped line that could appear enclosed in an object, as its boundary or as the imaginary guideline for a composition – was a compositional device that excited the attention of a viewer as it evoked movement. In the present work, Hogarth’s ‘Line of Beauty’ can be seen as Hudson’s attempt to point out the principles that equalise humankind; the search for beauty is common to everyone regardless of their position or amount of wealth.