Backstories

Francesca Woodman’s engagement with the figure was not only connected to re-interpretations of classical art, but also reflective of the art of her time. In the 1970s—when Woodman made much of her work as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design—artists from Hannah Wilke to Bruce Nauman were concerned with representations of the body and self, stemming from wide-ranging concerns about its relationship to cultural and physical space. Here Woodman uses the shroud - as plaster cast or embroidered sheet - in two series’ of images to alternately hide and reveal the figure’s form, in both sculptural and perfomative ways.

Francesca Woodman’s contact sheets are revealing about her process, demonstrating ways that ideas took shape as she explored and realized them while printing. Each contact sheet has at least a half a dozen frames trying to work out what the right composition should be for a particular photograph. Here she experiments with a variety of compositions and poses, concerned with juxtaposing various patterns, fabrics and the body.

Francesca Woodman was well-acquainted with the traditions of Classical Western art and representations of the figure within it, which seeped into her own picture-making. While perhaps better-known for her photographs of the full female body—she specified that she used nudes “in an ironic sense like classical painting nudes"—Woodman returned again and again to highly composed glimpses of hands and feet.

Francesca Woodman was a frequent visitor to the Maldoror bookshop during the year she spent studying in Rome. In the hours she spent rooting through the stacks there, she began to collect old notebooks filled with elaborate handwriting exercises and objective mathematical lessons, all in Italian.

"While I was in Rome my Junior year I began to work with the ideas that presently occupy me,” Francesca Woodman wrote in 1980. “I also met a number of Italian artists who shared similar concerns in other mediums. In June we had a show at the Ugo Ferranti Gallery, my first exhibition in a prestigious gallery. That year I also showed at the Libreria Maldoror, a book store and gallery specializing in Futurist and Dada Literature. The owners introduced me to many rare books and writers, ets.”

Francesca Woodman was deliberate about the photographs she made, frequently sketching in her journal and jotting down notes about her concepts and intentions. Here you can see the evolution of some specific “Ideas in Antella:” first as simple drawings, then translated from photographic negatives to a contact sheet, and finally as the pair of lush and mysterious gelatin silver prints now on view at Marian Goodman Gallery New York.

Over the course of Francesca Woodman's solo exhibition "Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories" at Marian Goodman Gallery New York, we’ll be sharing additional images and materials from Woodman’s archive which shed light on her process and elaborate on specific works currently on view.

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.