biography
George Woodman in his studio, New York City, circa 1980s.
"It was daunting to move into the cavernous studio [Tuscany, 1965-66] occupied by the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrandt nearly a century earlier. Surrounded by casts from the Parthenon, I began timidly with a little geometric painting. Freezing in winter, I burned lumber scraps in the round stove and learned to paint with gloves on. The high window gave me sky and the tips of cypress trees. I came to love this great vaulted 16th century room. The sculpture I learned to ignore, little realizing that 30 years later many paintings would be based on it."
- George Woodman, 2006
George Woodman (1932 – 2017) was a painter and photographer whose career spanned more than sixty years and included forays into diverse visual media. He began his career as an abstract painter, best known for his formally inventive tessellations and complex understanding of color. Woodman was deeply influenced by classical and modernist traditions and his extensive international travels. He remained committed to explorations of color and abstraction in a variety of forms—referencing landscape, architecture, geometry and pattern—before embracing representation and turning primarily to photography.
Woodman was born in Concord, New Hampshire. At age 13, he took art courses at the nearby Manchester Art Institute and decided to become a painter. After high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, he graduated from Harvard University in 1954 with honors in philosophy. While studying at Harvard, Woodman continued his education as an artist through courses at the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and in a pottery class in Cambridge taught by Betty Abrahams, who became known as Betty Woodman after the pair married in 1953. The young couple drove from Boston to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1954, where Woodman studied painting at the University of New Mexico and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1956. After completing his studies, they moved to Boulder, Colorado, where Woodman taught painting and philosophy of art at the University of Colorado for thirty years, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1995. He was an influential professor and artist in the Colorado scene, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, associated for many years with Criss-Cross—a collective of artists concerned with pattern and structure—and was a founding member of the pivotal Spark Gallery in Denver.
With his wife and children, Charles and Francesca, Woodman first visited Italy for a year from 1959-60 and set up a studio there in Settignano. He was profoundly influenced by the ordered appearance of the Italian landscape, which shifted his approach to painting it away from the influence of Cezanne and towards geometric or topographic abstraction. Upon returning to Boulder in 1960, Woodman’s abstract approach to landscape continued to evolve and he presented this work in solo and group exhibitions inNew York and Colorado. He once remarked: “I painted many more Italian landscapes in Boulder than I ever did in Italy.”
Woodman returned to Italy, near Florence, in 1965 on a University of Colorado Faculty Fellowship, spending the year there with his family and painting in a 16th century studio surrounded by casts from the Parthenon. There he began his first series of systematic compositions formulated according to a pre-ordained color system. The year spent in proximity to European art and culture proved to be consequential. It included much travel, including a visit to the Alhambra in Spain to study tiles, which inspired his distinct move to pattern painting. So important was the influence of time in Italy on his work that he and Betty used the funds from his 1967 National Endowment for the Arts grant to buy a farmhouse in Antella, just outside ofFlorence, where he kept a studio starting 1968 and returned for part of every year for the rest of his life.
Woodman’s idiosyncratic approach to pattern and color—influenced by Minimalism as well as eclectic decorative traditions absorbed on his increasingly frequent travels—continued to develop throughout the 1970s. During this decade, he covered canvases with geometric tessellations while also incorporating a shifting color palette, rendering his patterns with depth and complexity. By 1978, he developed a pattern system which he referred to as “non-periodic” that led directly to the immersive paper tile installations often created in collaboration with students according to his instructions. Woodman’s work was championed by the critic Amy Goldin and he began to show more widely both internationally and nationally, including alongside artists connected to the Pattern and Decoration movement.
After spending odd semesters in New York City starting in 1978, the Woodmans bought a loft there in 1980, and began dividing their time between Boulder, New York, and Antella. Meanwhile, Woodman’s work with pattern continued to evolve. Temporary paper tile installations led to permanent compositions in ceramic tile, with major public commissions inDetroit, Michigan; Denver, Colorado; and Buffalo, New York. Floral imagery and architectural elements appeared in his paintings, which at times were constructed as free-standing screens. He began to paint the figure, shrouded in layers of pattern. Although tessellations began to recede over the course of the decade, the figure remained, in the form of shaped canvases and other paintings based on classical and Renaissance motifs, as well as in photographs, which became his primary medium from this point on.
After retiring from teaching in the 1990s, Woodman spent half of each year in Antella and half in New York for the next two decades. He continued an active studio practice centered largely on black and white photographs of nudes in classical architectural and sculptural settings. His photographs derived much from his decades of exploration as a painter, including integrating complex series of patterns; layering abstract and representational imagery in both the darkroom and camera; constructing complex compositions from discreet parts; referencing classical and modernist art; and eventually returning to painting, adding color and geometry to his gelatin silver prints.
Woodman’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Mexico since the 1970s, including Patterning and Decoration, Museum of the AmericanFoundation for the Arts, Miami, Florida, 1977; 19 Artist – Emergent Americans, Guggenheim Museum,New York, 1981; More than One Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1992; Pitti Rivisitato: Fotographie di George Woodman, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy, 1997; Imagenes de Tiempo, Sensibilidad y Sombra, Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, 1999; Photographs of George Woodman, Amethyst Gallery,Chennai, India, 2001; and Camera Obscura Photographs, Grand Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, 2004. A retrospective of forty years of Woodman’s painting was presented at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in 2006.Posthumously, his work has been presented in exhibitions including Pattern, Decoration, and Crime, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland and to Le Consortium, Dijon, France,2018; Les Chemins du Sud, Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain (MRAC) Occitanie, Serignan, France, 2019; and Betty Woodman and George Woodman,Charleston, Lewes, East Sussex, England, 2023.
An accomplished writer, Woodman published critical texts, catalogue essays, and exhibition reviews in addition to four books: Museum Pieces, 1996; The Further Adventures of Pinocchio with poems byEdwin Frank, 2004; How a Picture Grows a World with poems by Iris Cushing, 2010; and Metaphysics is to Metaphor as Cartography is to Departure, 2011.
George Woodman’s works are represented in public collections including Museum ofModern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.