George Woodman

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.

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.

During his 2004 residency at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, George Woodman continued his work with one-of-a-kind, large-scale still life photographs, made using a camera obscura.

Beginning his career in the 1950s as an abstract painter, by the mid 1960s George Woodman turned his focus to geometric abstractions grounded in complex patterned systems and rigorous formal structures.

Today we celebrate what would have been Betty and George Woodman’s 67th wedding anniversary.

Happy Birthday to George: artist and writer, classicist and modernist, lifelong explorer and thinker, maestro of color and grisaille.