George Woodman

In 1984, following a series of exhibitions at PS1 dedicated to “Art Couples,” art historian and critic Donald Kuspit organized "1 + 1 = 2" at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition paired the work of 31 artist couples and acknowledged a long-overdue cultural shift in recognizing women artists as peers to their male counterparts. Betty Woodman and George Woodman—included in the exhibition and married for more than thirty years at that point—often credited their mutual respect for and support of each other as artists as the bedrock of their marriage.

In May of 1979, George Woodman received this review from “The Village Voice” in the mail, clipped and sent to him by his daughter Francesca. It was addressed in her hand “For Daddy,” and pointed out where his work is discussed.

Francesca Woodman was born on this day in 1958. Her artist parents used this drawing by George, recently discovered in the family archive, to share the good news with family and friends.

George Woodman’s landscape paintings from the early 1960s were influenced by modernists from Cézanne to Diebenkorn and profoundly impacted by his year-long stay in Italy. “The landscape in Italy is not the same. Italy is not a natural object. The earth is shaped. The hillsides are terraced…I painted many more Italian landscapes in Boulder than I ever did in Italy."

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.

From his early abstract paintings to more recent painted photographs, color was a powerful and continuous thread in George Woodman’s work. Even as his focus shifted to black and white photography, Woodman never abandoned his interest in color, instead finding ways to create unexpected dialogues between and across media.

Francesca Woodman often used the backs of her photographs to write letters to family and friends, addressing, stamping and dropping her prints directly into the mailbox. In this exchange between her and George from April 1977, they discuss her first forays into fashion photography and other news from Providence and Boulder.

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.

A former wine cellar underneath the family's stone farmhouse in Antella, Italy was transformed in to a new photography and painting studio for George Woodman, with surrounding views of the Tuscan countryside.

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.

George Woodman’s The Rochester Carpet was a sprawling, patterned mosaic temporarily covering the floor of the Bevier Gallery at Rochester Institute of Technology in December of 1984. This site-specific work was just one of the artist’s ambitious and encompassing tile projects, extending his earlier practice as an abstract painter by employing complex systems of pattern and color across public spaces.

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.