Henry Hudson

In his final work in the series, The Execution, Hudson draws from Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814), a work that has been endlessly reproduced and re-interpreted by artists throughout art history, ranging from Édouard Manet or Pablo Picasso to Yue Minjun. The last scene of The Rise and Fall of Young Sen sees his final demise, where after years of provocation and subversion through art-making and critical commentary the authorities arrest Young Sen, sentencing him to execution by fire squad. A group of prisoners on the left of the composition face their fate, as the bodies of the already dead lie on the floor. To the right, Sen is being beaten by two policemen, while Daniel, who again has tried in vain to save his friend and lover, watches, desolate, his face contorted in agony and suffering. In a further appropriation from art history, Hudson draws inspiration from Otto Dix’s work Straßenkampf (Street Fight) from 1927, substituting the policemen’s uniforms for those of German soldiers. In a powerful re-interpretation of these works, Hudson addresses here a subject that has preoccupied artists for centuries; their right to express themselves in total freedom.

In contrast to the opening panel of the series, where warm colours suggested a hopeful and bright future for Young Sen, the palette here is dark, giving a dramatic ending to the narrative. The cold and wintery colours of the night, with snowflakes falling incessantly and swirling in the windy skies, contrast starkly against the bloody heaps of slush that accumulate on the floor. To the back of the composition, a police bus has arrived. In the same position as the bus that waited, door open for Young Sen to embark on his new, promising life, this bus stands, however, for its absolute contrary. Here some prisoners will receive a lethal injection as their final sentence.

With this final, dramatic work, Hudson closes The Rise and Fall of Young Sen. Like Hogarth, he has portrayed Sen throughout his progress; as an innocent, promising young student, when temptation starts to appear, as he rises again to succeed, but finally falls. Unlike Hogarth, Hudson does not, however, lecture the viewer on the dangers of moral vices. Hudson is here a social commentator, a critical observer of today’s world. He leaves it to the viewer to interpret the myriad references hidden or blatantly obvious in his works, to re-discover, and perhaps re-interpret A Contemporary Artist’s Progress.