Betty Woodman

Osman Can Yerbekan looks back on 1984 Metropolis Magazine feature on Betty Woodman and George Woodman, linking the early influence of architecture on Betty’s ceramics to her legacy as a radical sculptor.

Betty Woodman in “Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 29, 2021.

George Woodman and Betty Woodman began their nearly seven decade relationship in life and art in 1950. While Betty was on a year-long solo trip to Fiesole, Italy from 1951-52, the two regularly exchanged passionate love letters and affectionate notes.

Betty Abrahams Woodman was raised with her sister in Newton, Massachusetts by their “liberal, anti-religious and culturally ambitious” parents who fostered in their daughters the importance of responsibility and self-determination. This New Year’s card from the late 40s - early 50s reveals a young Betty with her family.

After acquiring a loft in New York City in 1980, Betty and George began to split their time between homes and studios in Manhattan, Boulder, Colorado and Antella, Italy—a way of living that became vital to their work. A 1984 feature on the couple in the magazine Metropolis chronicles their dynamic lives, relationship and art.

Betty Woodman’s Chinese Pleasure (2007-2008) was commissioned by the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program for the United States Embassy in Beijing. Woodman was inspired by and freely borrowed from visual influences all over the world and throughout art history, here incorporating three distinct moments in the history of Chinese art, ranging from Sichuan bronzes to popular culture into this dramatic installation.

In 1960, after returning to Boulder, Colorado, from their first year together in Italy, the Woodman family moved into the Sirotkin House. One of more than a dozen modernist homes in Boulder by architect Tician Papachristou, the house was designed for the original owner as a pair with the house next door.

In 1987, Betty Woodman began her work at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, as an artist invited by the French Ministry of Culture. Over the course of more than twenty years, she made a series of sculptural vases and cups and saucers in brilliantly decorated porcelain, later shown at the Palazzo Pitti in her adopted home city of Florence.

Beginning in 1965, Betty, George, Charlie and Francesca Woodman spent an influential year together as a family in Italy, immersed in museums, art, and culture. Their affinity for Florence took root, leading to the acquisition of a farmhouse in Antella several years later that has served as a family and creative nucleus ever since.

The catalogue for Pattern, Crime & Decoration—a two-part exhibition at MAMCO, Geneva and Le Consortium, Dijon —focuses on the work of artists associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in the US. It includes paintings by George Woodman and wall-based ceramic sculptures by Betty Woodman.

Her exhibition in the Matrix series at Wadsworth Atheneum in 1992 helped to define a context for Betty Woodman's work in ceramics within the larger world of contemporary art, highlighting "that Woodman sees herself ‘dealing with painting as much as with sculpture.'"

Betty Woodman’s The Red Table (2014) is included in this exhibition of works from the museum’s collection which explore the significance of our domestic spaces.