Over the past few months, the Foundation delved into Betty Woodman's and George Woodman’s personal library as part of our ongoing work to build a study center. The Woodmans’ personal library comprises more than five hundred books, including textbooks, catalogues from artist friends, numerous painters' biographies, bookmarked travel guides, and many more. These well-worn volumes are filled with bookmarks and annotations left by Betty and George, a testament to the lifetimes they spent as students of art and the ways this appeared in their own work.

Betty Woodman’s books on Japanese textiles and woodblock prints, in particular, are extensively bookmarked, with pages cut and ripped away by the artist. She often amassed many of these books on her travels regardless of whether she could read the language, choosing instead to let the images weave themselves into her visual lexicon.

Drawing inspiration from centuries-old Japanese national treasures, Woodman continuously reinterpreted visual motifs from woodblock prints. The well-dressed women in a pair of ukiyo-e prints reproduced in Fashion of Edo make an appearance in Woodman’s Edo Fashion Ladies. In After the Bath, dumplings served by a young woman in the original woodblock print transform into a wine glass, and supple figures of women and billowy obi belts are amplified by sweeping brush strokes. On the second sides of this diptych, she dressed her vases with vibrant geometric patterns, partially accumulated from the many books on Japanese fashion in her collection. These exuberant designs come alive on Woodman's anthropomorphic vessels, paying homage to the age-old metaphor of vases as bodies.