George Woodman

Over the course of a year from 1965-66, the Woodman family lived and worked in Italy, just outside of Florence. During that time, Betty and George became close friends with the artists and then-couple Nancy Graves and Richard Serra, who, like Betty, was there for the year on a Fulbright-Hays scholarship. They spent many hours together around the table, sharing meals, funny hats and conversations about art.

Our archival intern Erin Moss, who is in her second year at the Pratt School of Information earning her MLIS, has been processing George Woodman's extensive slide collection this semester. The slide collection consists of thousands of 35mm or medium format slides from the 1950s through the early 2000s documenting both George's work and personal life. Erin has been struck by the experience of discovering an artist through their own archival materials.

Last week was an exciting one at the Woodman Family Foundation. Upon their long-awaited return to New York, we were treated to a room full of George Woodman’s paintings. And wow we were bowled over by how fresh and contemporary these paintings feel, despite the fact that they were made some 50 years ago. We were struck by the subtle and shifting interplay of color and pattern and the raw intelligence of George's approach, which are slowly revealed over the course of a lingering look. What a pleasure to see these ambitious and original works in person.

In the fall of 1982, the exhibition “Partitions” at Pratt Manhattan Center Gallery featured the work of 15 artists—including George Woodman—concerned with contemporary interpretations of screens. As hybrid sculptural, decorative, functional objects, partitions and interest in them were a kind of corollary to the burgeoning Pattern and Decoration Movement, and described by critic John Perreault, who wrote the exhibition’s essay, as “ubiquitous,” “a phenomenon,” and “a challenge to some preconceptions about art."

September of 1977 marked the start of new academic year for each of the Woodmans and the pursuit of teaching or studies in four different locations around the US and Europe. Francesca Woodman had just begun her fruitful year in Rome with the RISD European Honors Program, after spending some time in Antella. In a letter sent to her from Boulder, George Woodman recaps summer travels and reports on the rest of the family’s activities.

We are pleased to announce that this exhibition includes a selection of correspondence written between Betty, Francesca and George Woodman in 1978, as well as Francesca Woodman’s “Selected Video Works,” 1976-1978.

George Woodman and Betty Abrahams wrote each other regularly beginning soon after they met in 1951—while Betty was at home in Newton, MA and later in Fiesole, Italy and George at home in Concord, NH or at school at Harvard in Cambridge, MA—until they married in 1953.

The Woodman family’s lifelong love of Italy began in 1951 with Betty’s yearlong apprenticeship in Fiesole. After marrying in 1953, Betty and George took their young children, Charles and Francesca, for extended stays in 1959-60 and again in 1965-66.

George Woodman’s exhibition at the Boulder Center for the Visual Arts in the fall of 1981 was a survey of his various approaches to pattern over 15 years, ranging from his complex tessellations, to the use of pattern to unify a surface, to a rigorous examination of the decorative, and finally to the all-encompassing perceptual experience of his room-scaled paper tile installations.

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.