He got very nervous about it — I think he was more interested in her than in photography — so she asked me to go with her. I had to sit in a room outside, but if she squawked or sounded like she needed help, I was to go right in. Consider the image in question facing page, top left and you pick up a powerful sense of this backstory: it has a wonderfully secretive quality.
What happens in a museum when all the visitors go home? In this one, a kind of ghost appears in the form of Woodman, who can be glimpsed behind a large vitrine in which sits the huge and alarmingly toothy skull of some unidentifiable animal. She was concentrating on the picture.
Surely it is quite clear that she has seduction in mind. However wild, however toothy, however dead, this strange animal, you gather, will soon be putty in her hands. Woodman committed suicide in , at the age of just As a result, it is her self-portraits — funny, artful, neurotic, and occasionally painfully honest — that have always attracted the most attention. People want to see this extraordinary lost girl; they remain convinced that her primary subject was herself.
But her parents refute this. And while the artist herself is nearly always present, it is her limbs and torso we see most often, not her face. She was fun to be with. They psychoanalyse them. They see the photographs as very personal. Life as a working artist can be hard: the Woodmans, both artists themselves, know this.
She focused on photography early on, a medium in which neither of us worked —she struck off on her own. Photo by Annik Wetter. Ceramic Pictures of Roman Vases: Vividareum , Canvas, terra sigillata, glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, paint. In these works, the artist goes further and inverts these mechanisms, creating sculptural objects with painted images, and vice versa. And where she does not imitate them, she imagines carpets and tables, vases and rooms: the works in this series elude the expectations of the viewer, moving freely in their use of materials and forms of representation.
I chanced upon the church of Santa Brigida and was intrigued by the patterns of the illusory painting of marble that covers the walls. Roman baroque church interiors seem to be focused on color and on breaking out of the geometry in contrast to Renaissance Florentine churches, where grey and white coolness and order are predominant.
I have become more courageous as a painter and these new Roman Paintings are increasingly about the interplay of the painting on the canvas and the ceramic elements fastened to it. Betty Woodman, interview with Patterson Sims.
Each wall image is a literal reflection of the three-dimensional vases which occupy the space in front of the wall. The viewer participates by moving past the piece. I have thought about Roman wall painting where there are illusions of architectural views which always contain images of pottery on pictorial walls.
How can I trigger the memory of something experienced, dreamed or imagined? Betty Woodman: Between Sculpture and Painting. Approximately Glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, paint, canvas, wood.
Installation views, American Academy in Rome. Photos by Bruno Bruchi. These give the illusion, with their columns and windows, of architecture within architecture.
I have also observed how often these frescos include images of vases. Glazed earthenware, canvas, wood, acrylic paint. I looked at a lot of painting.
I listened to a lot of painters talk. I absorbed all this. It was harder for me, in a way, to come to appreciate sculpture, even though I was working three-dimensionally.
Bonnard really had a big influence on me. And Matisse. Betty Woodman, interview with Barry Schwabksy. New York: Salon 94 and Skira, The Summer House, Glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, acrylic paint, canvas, wood. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy ICA London. What has being in Florence and that region of Italy meant for you and your work?
Betty Woodman: Quite a lot. Certainly the wall paintings, frescoes, and painting within architecture. And the window not just being a hole, but embellished. The same with a door.
And the flowerpot, the lemon pot, absolutely conceived of as part of architecture. Courtyard Morning , Noon , Dusk , Courtyard Evening , Courtyard: Pontormo , Courtyard: Van Gogh , Glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, acrylic paint, canvas. There are many examples of this in Pompeii. Modernists like Bonnard and Matisse paint a window with a view.
Wall Street Journal , Liverpool Fountain , Permanent public artwork originally commissioned by Liverpool Biennial. Photos by Joel Chester Fildes. Her work refers to classical imagery and architectural decoration, combining sources that include Greek and Etruscan sculpture, Minoan and Egyptian art, Italian Baroque architecture and the paintings of Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse. While his early investigations with painting later shifted to a focus on black and white photography, Woodman never abandoned his interest in color.
Instead, he found ways to combine the two, creating unexpected dialogues. Untitled , c. Almost Minimalist , Oil paint on gelatin silver print. Color is approached as a chromatic keyboard upon which precisely calibrated harmonies are built, synthetic rather than naturalistic.
Each painting or series of paintings builds on a family of colors, often of equal intensity. While his later work leaves such a purist position behind, he remains very much a classicist in his deliberate procedure of working and the clarity of his forms. The 'Chromatic Progressions' were formulated according to a pre-ordained system. Color can even take on iconographic significance: in [some works from the s], for example, a range of colors employed by artists from the Baroque, Rococo and neoclassical phases of French painting is summarized and codified.
Grey Portal , This field is composed of almost entirely non-repeating tessellations, sometimes highly similar in form but largely unique, showing Woodman exchanging the regimented symmetry of his earlier work for an organic sense of echoing, and of growth and flux. When structurally the painting is an homogeneous extension of small parts, the control and guidance of attention, the scaling of contrasts, spatial articulation and the development of specific shape identities are all powers granted to the inflection of color.
For some years I enjoyed using color and pattern elements in strictly serialized permutational systems. Now I find it more congenial to develop color within these inexorable patterns to ends more idiosyncratic and romantic. The degree of contrast or similarity among shapes, the frequency of their repetition, ease or difficulty of their recognition, intrinsic interest or monotony, ratio of edge to surface plus their absolute size have profound implications for the kind of color experience that can be realized in a painting.
In planning new work I usually commence with a conception of color and develop a pattern which seems appropriate to the kind of total impact sought in the painting.
The effect was marvelous as the colors were visible as delicate tints beneath the white gesso. The result was an off-white pattern painting. The success of this accident led Woodman to paint a number of white paintings from scratch in the next few years. What a relief to be free of dense color! These skeins of pastel tones are in fact further permutations upon the hexagon.
It started with the Romans, burst into flower in Isfahan in the 13th century and ended up in my lap in the s—Why me? The hexagon was becoming a cruel mistress. And my studio skylight leaked from melting snow, the gas heater hissed, I could hear the sound of someone shoveling snow across the street. Euridice and Amor , Psyche and Amor in the Wisteria , Closing with his actual sources in black and white photographs that are painterly, the artist visualizes a duskier, more emphatic world.
Museum Pieces: Photographs by George Woodman. Bianca , Society Girls: Alexandra with J. Sargent, Robert Berlind.
George Woodman: Sensuality in a World of Reason. Pitti Screen , These sensuous black and whites are intense with historical allusions, visual puns, and playful self-reference. When combined with the chromatics of oil paint, a duo, a dialogue, is created in which the two voices retain their separate identities yet sound in harmony. The pacing and dramatics of the picture becomes more resolved and my expressive intent is brought forward.
Sara with Venus , Blue Arm and Chinese Maiden , This chromatic shift comes naturally to Woodman given his background, and he does it with great balance and care. What I am doing now in painting on my photographs is not as new, sudden or capricious as some may think. It has been a long story. These painted photographs not only blur the lines between photography and painting, they also blur the lines between colour and black and white photography.
And each even posing a different aesthetic stance. About 10 years ago I became involved in colour photography in which the subject still life, model, flowers, whatever always included a black and white photograph…The point of the series was to make a colour photograph of a black and white photograph which was expressively convincing in the context in which it was presented. It was a fascinating experience. Nancy in my Studio , In her photographs and videos, she stages and sequences her own body in space, creating fragments of subjective and symbolic dramas.
All works by Francesca Woodman. Self-deceit , Rome, Italy, Gelatin silver prints. Variable dimensions. This performative element in the work creates a sort of symbolic narrative played out in specific private actions, in which Woodman experiments with the interrelationships between the body, time, and space.
She sometimes conflates these essences so that they are an inextricable continuum that resists representation. In a series entitled 'Self-Deceits,' her figure appears in a decaying interior shallow space adopting various poses in relation to a large piece of mirror. The mirror reflects only glare or darkness, and the figure is constantly blocked by its aggressive reflection of emptiness. The clarity of the mirrored reflection, as well as that of the photographic record is thwarted, as if to suggest that any simple representation is not sufficient to portray an individual or idea.
Spring in Providence , Providence, Rhode Island, In the first photograph Francesca Woodman appears wearing her dark overcoat, next to a long roll of white paper hanging vertically from the wall, while in the following image she is observing with interest, after an omitted interval of time that we know has gone by even if its passage has not been recorded, some marks on the paper from which, with the aid of a pair of scissors, some luxuriant cabbages sprout photograph no.
Once anticipated the change of season on a paper that conceptually joins the fictitious with the real, once smashed its bi-dimensionality, the artist returns with a vengeance in the photographic representation.
Francesca, the allegory of Spring, moves away in the fourth stage of the series, perhaps in order to get rid of an unnecessary cover when the good weather arrives. Interventions, performance, sculpture, photography. Milan: Silvana Editoriale Spa, In a set of images made when she was resident at the MacDowell Colony, she pictures herself in a stand of birch trees. Sometimes she appears nude, with strips of birch bark around her arms. At other times she is wearing a dress, but without arms—already a trunk.
In other images she wears the dress and displays her arms encased in birch bark. It feels as if she is enacting the myth of Daphne being transformed into a tree. Half-inch black-and-white open reel video with sound, transferred to DVD, minutes. Whether still or moving, her images document a performance for the camera.
In her journal, she parenthetically asked herself, 'are blurs possible in film,' revealing her desire to translate her photographic language into the moving image…She is not interested in a narrative arc, whether verbal or through a succession of scenes.
Instead, the video camera records from approximately the same fixed point from which her still camera would. Woodman seems to have been relatively unmotivated by the new perceptual experiences that early video artists were exploring, most likely because her concerns revolved around performance and its documentation as opposed to structuralist investigations of the medium. Nevertheless, the video camera allowed her to expand on the temporal concerns of her photography by means of movement within the frame, zooming in and out of the image, and the duration of the tape itself.
This involved using her body to organize the space, and a careful preparation of the scene before the actual shot. She would take a series of shots, and then choose to print only one or two. This was her method. However, the preparatory phase of constructing the photograph was not only performance stripping, covering the body with pigment, dressing in clothespins , but also involved the construction of space—or rather, the choice of place and the location of objects in the scene.
In other words, Woodman prepared the space in which she then placed herself. She mounted the camera on a tripod and then proceeded to test, endlessly verifying the objects, the light, and so on, looking through the lens, and imagining herself in the space she had conceived.
Isabella Pedicini. Rome: Contrasto, June In these self-performances her naked body is both the subject as well as the instrument with which she renders herself visible.
At the same time in the two subsequent photographs a peculiar correspondence is at stake between the materiality of the self-presentation body, paint, flour and the mediality of its performance floor, paper, videotape, photograph.
The artist not only produces a bodily imprint of her figure, but also represents herself a second time, positioned in relation to this silhouette. The ephemerality of the first forms of depiction—the materialized photogram on the floor, which turns the dusted floor into photographic paper—counterbalances the permanence of her shape in the photograph taken afterwards.
What the video performance could only capture as a sequence of individual moments the frozen movement of the photograph endows with an arrested poise. If the engendering of the first representation requires that the artist put an end to the tableau vivant she is staging the reclining statue by leaving the scene, her disappearance from our view allows the persona 'Francesca Woodman' to appear in a double sense: as a representation of herself which she has left behind and as an artist who has returned to her work, though once again as a figure in a double self-portrait.
Space2 , Providence, Rhode Island, Onto a number of the small squares of the contact sheet she then draws crude rectangles, which seem to contain her as she lies in a corner, or through which she steps and bends, or, in one image, which appear to distort as she kicks out. London: Phaidon Press, Untitled , Andover, Massachusetts, Indeed, they reveal, unintentionally or not, the effort and work that is part of her staging and her performance.
To what extent does her draping hair suggest a blending of body with setting? Or, to what extent is her body moving into the naturally created crevice, as opposed to exiting? Nora Burnett Abrams. Francesca Woodman: Portrait of a Reputation. New York: Rizzoli Electa, Her right hand soon emerges above the upper edge of the paper and begins to inscribe her given name in black pen on the white surface…For a few moments, we once more see the silhouette of her entire body through the backlit paper, only now the letters of her name run across the white sheet at the level of her waist.
Both hands suddenly appear in front of the paper, grab it, and begin to tear strips from it. Settings may vary from confined interiors to the expansive outdoors, but Woodman herself is always there. Typically the sole subject, and often naked, she can be found caught entwined within a landscape or edging out of the photographic frame.
Interested in the limits of representation, the artist's body is habitually cropped, endlessly concealed, and never wholly captured. Woodman was acutely aware of the evanescent nature of life and of living close to death. She positions the self as too limitless to be contained, and thus reveals singular identity as an elusive and fragmentary notion.
Francesca Woodman was born in Denver in She was the daughter of two American artists, George Woodman, a painter and photographer who held a teaching post in art criticism at the University of Colorado, and Betty Woodman, an increasingly important ceramic artist.
Growing up in Boulder, surrounded entirely by painters, filmmakers, and critics, Francesca was close to her older brother Charles, himself an aspiring video-artist. In this self-portrait at the age of thirteen, one of Woodman's first, she photographs herself turning her head away from the camera in a debut gesture of defiance against usual portrait photography in which we expect to see the face of the sitter. Woodman holds a rod to release the shutter which once intentionally blurred and out of focus transforms to become an otherworldly shard of darkness.
Her face is covered completely by her hair and the space around her is composed of fragmented elements, including a door, the under lit bench upon which she sits, and an empty chair. The work already possesses many of the qualities that define the artist's oeuvre more generally.
By including the camera cord she makes it clear that she herself is the author of her image, and through the use of techniques of long-exposure, an unusual low perspective, and the play of extreme light and dark she shows that she is not making 'straight' and easy to digest photography. Somewhat paradoxically, through the use of a square format she introduces her interest in traditional 19 th -century techniques to capture and print images.
Like many of her works, the photograph portrays a moment between adolescence and adulthood, exploring aspects of both presence and absence. For the art historian Chris Townsend these are works that "stop being about aesthetics, and they're about the properties of photography". This particular picture bears many similarities to a photograph taken by Duane Michaels in the same year, a black and white portrait of Joseph Cornell.
The parallel affirms Woodman and Michael's shared interest in conjuring mystical atmosphere, and highlights the fact that Woodman was powerfully influenced by the work of others. Woodman had encountered Michael's work in exhibitions. This picture, taken in Boulder, Woodman's hometown in Rhode Island, features the artist intertwined with the roots of a tree.
Immersed in the water, the artist's horizontal naked body is supported by the undergrowth. Her long hair floats, whilst her fair skin provides good contrast to the dark shadows cast all around. In the background there are gravestones, revealing that the tree is situated on the edge of a burial site. Woodman's hair, her legs, and the roots of the tree all become serpent-like in their curves.
As such the picture recalls the Christian creation story and Woodman becomes associated with Eve. Like the first woman on the earth she is an active agent for change, and pursues the forbidden fruit of knowledge to both a creative and destructive end.
The work unites life and death. There is a reference to birth as Woodman appears to emerge from a watery possibly in-uterine environment, but at the same time we imagine the end of life when buried beneath the surface.
Both Ana Mendieta and Frida Kahlo also depicted themselves as trees. As such we recall the classical Greek goddess, Daphne, who when under attack, in a gesture of self-perseverance, transformed her body into a tree. Furthermore, the floating female body in water is also reminiscent of Ophelia, the Shakespearian character who fell from a tree overhanging the river and there floated until her death.
Woodman worked frequently outdoors as well as in the studio. This disrupts the typical Feminist reading of the artist's indoor projects of just a young woman protesting against the oppressive confines of her life. Such 'oppression' was generally linked to the artist's struggle against the expectation to be a 'good' or 'angelic' woman. Yet as a seeming paradox, Woodman felt a profound personal connection to nature. This link is 'problematic' for some intellectuals because it suggests that there is an 'essential' and intuitive way to be female, rather than supporting the argument triggered by Woodman's indoor works, that gender is wholly constructed and as such should be challenged.
This though, is the feat of Francesca Woodman, to expose character as complex and multi-layered and not easily definable. Woodman also photographed herself close up to the gravestones here featured in the distance. The image recalls Woodman's interest in gothic literature, and the art critic James McMillian accentuates such connections, when he writes that these works unearth in him, "Poe's macabre humor as well as the death-driven juxtapositions prevalent in Emily Dickinson's poems.
Taken in black and white, Space2 features Woodman standing naked against a wall between two large windows, merging her body entirely with the surrounding environment by covering parts of herself with discarded wallpaper. She is working in a derelict building and art historian Chris Townsend has suggested that the work may have been directly inspired by a Victorian novella called 'The Yellow Wallpaper' , in which a woman is forcibly confined to a room by her husband.
As such Woodman exposes the idea of silencing and hiding women in domestic settings. However, like Louise Bourgeois' in her drawings and sculptures of the 'femme maison', Woodman appears to absorb strength from her own disintegration. If the house is considered as a protective dwelling place it could then be considered substitute for our first dwelling place, that of the womb. Thus the themes of imprisonment, growth, and nourishment all combine.
A house, like the body of a woman, is a vast field of memory; a derelict house holds within it as much haunting traces of the past, as it does future possibilities for what can grow in the dwelling. In this sense we are reminded of the interior plaster cast made of a whole 'home' by London based artist, Rachel Whiteread.
As part of her Space series, Woodman also includes images of her body 'trapped' inside a glass vitreen, and pictures in which she explores the dissolution of her body inside an empty room. Like the Surrealists, she explores notions of presence and absence, existence and non-existence, and repeatedly poses the question, Who Am I?
Adding yet another layer to these discussions, art critic Ken Johnson also recognizes the influence of Deborah Turbeville fashion photographer who Woodman admired , which he sees here in the "lushly shadowed and textured scenes". Through the simple gesture of tipping her head back and then flipping the photograph over completely Woodman disconcerts the viewer's traditional way of looking at the world. In On Being an Angel 1 , the artist reclines backwards, naked, exposing her shoulders and chest, as she looks straight into the camera.
The space around her is dark, creating deep contrast to her highlighted body. Framed upside down, the artist appears to be floating, and utterly disrupts our usual sense of perspective. It is the first picture of the larger body of work that explores the Woodman's recurring interest of being an angel.
The angel is an intermediate figure, a heavenly being that spends some time on earth, and it is this position situated between two opposites where Woodman often finds herself. Woodman is recorded to have said that she disliked the term 'self-portrait', and claimed that she merely used herself as a model for a matter of convenience, emphasizing that the importance of the work is always in her chosen themes.
As an 'angel' unable to get back to the heavens, there are strong undertones of frustration in this work. Indeed, in later photographs also part of the angel series, this frustration develops into aggression as Woodman writhes and screams in front of a paint-splattered wall. The violent gesture of paint throwing in these later works re-casts the angel series with a sacrificial and murderous quality that recalls the work of Ana Mendieta.
Furthermore, Virginia Woolf famously writes of 'killing the angel in the house'. Woolf writes how 'the shadow of her wings fell on my page' and expresses the need to slay her because her goodness has been born following years upon years of subjugation of women.
It may indeed be the case that Woodman similarly attempts to banish the angel as an attack on patriarchy and assertion of individual female strength. The work also bares similarities with Man Ray's erotic Anatomies photograph , a further inspiration for Woodman. As is typical, the artist depicts herself naked revealing her need for tactility and sensuality.
The works possess a certain fetishism, which is a theme explored by Woodman.
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