A look back

Betty Woodman, life-long lover of flowers of all stripes, was born on this day in 1930. Happy birthday, Betty!

"At age fourteen I decided to become an artist, ambition enough for my life,” George Woodman once wrote. And over the next seven decades, he did just that, working fervently as a painter and photographer, and also as a writer and professor. Today, we celebrate George, who was born on this day in 1932!

Spring flowers always remind us of Betty Woodman, and particularly her vases in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which greeted visitors to the museum with their bold colors, overlapping patterns and allusions to vases and gardens, holding an ever-changing display of seasonal blooms. They were installed on the occasion of her 2006 retrospective there—the first time the museum dedicated such an exhibition to a living woman artist.

Fifty-two years ago this week would have been your last chance to see George Woodman’s solo exhibition at Spectrum Gallery in New York City. Woodman’s canvases and prints during this period were characterized by fields of interlocking, repetitive shapes, which, as Robert Berlind later described: “may be seen as a reprise of the transition earlier in the century from a still-descriptive cubism to a “purer” non-referentiality. These paintings are equally in keeping with the contemporaneous interests of Op Art and made a crucial contribution to the Criss-Cross movement which flourished in the 70’s in Boulder and had an impact on the New York scene.”

Born on this day in 1958 in Boulder, Colorado, Francesca Woodman lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island, Rome and New York City. Here she is on a summer day at the Coney Island boardwalk.

Betty Woodman first traveled to Italy in 1951, on the suggestion of her friends Grace and John Tagliabue who invited her to join them there. She spent the year in Fiesole, renting a room on a hillside overlooking Florence and its Duomo and working in a pottery studio owned by painter Giorgio Ferrero and sculptor Lionello Fallacara.

Although the Woodman Family Foundation archives are starting to take shape, there is still much more material to process before we are ready to open them up to scholars and researchers. Currently, we are processing George Woodman’s paper tiles and related plans, descriptions and documentation so that we can better understand this key aspect of his practice, which took his work with pattern off the canvas and into space and situation.

In the 1960s, Betty Woodman worked primarily in stoneware at her studio in Boulder, Colorado. At that time, she focused on producing functional ceramics, keeping careful notes about each piece.

Forty-one years ago, 19 Artists—Emergent Americans was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York featuring seven paintings by George Woodman, among work by eighteen of his contemporaries including Barbara Kruger, Guy de Cointet, and Manny Farber. The exhibition reflected curator Peter Frank’s desire to present the artists’ work as a series of small retrospectives. “What I have sought to assemble at the Guggenheim Museum is the skilled and confident visual articulation of engrossing ideas by individuals who have not been sufficiently recognized for their accomplishment,” he wrote.

Hi, this is Molly McBride Jacobson, archives intern at the Woodman Family Foundation. One of my projects has been inventorying, condensing, and rehousing Betty Woodman’s slide collection, which she used to document her work from the 1970s until the mid-2000s. She used this collection as a pre-digital database, arranging her slides by year and then separately by format.

In the summer of 1954, recent college graduate George Woodman set out from Boston towards Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had a degree in philosophy, and a desire to study painting in a more concentrated way than he had been able to do as an undergraduate student supplementing his Harvard education with art courses at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He and Betty Woodman—who had been married just a year—followed this set of Triptik maps across the country, carefully tracking miles and expenses along the way until they arrived at the University of New Mexico.

In the early 1980s, as Betty Woodman moved into a New York City loft with her husband, George Woodman, and began to shift her functional practice towards ceramic sculpture, she became friends with many artists deeply involved with the Pattern and Decoration movement. She collaborated with two of them: Joyce Kozloff and Cynthia Carlson.‍ With Kozloff, Woodman made ceramic forms—whether cups and saucers, pitchers or trays—which Kozloff then decorated with rich patterns inspired by Islamic tiles and motifs. The resulting works, which dissolve the line between craft and art, were shown in exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and the Queens Museum in 1981.