Weekly Volcano Blogs: Walkie Talkie Blog

April 3, 2012 at 10:49am

CLAYTON ON ART: The resurrection of Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman, "Polka Dots", Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 13.3 x 13.3 cm. © George and Betty Woodman, courtesy George and Betty Woodman

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A GUGGENHEIM SHOW 31 YEARS AFTER HER DEATH BY SUICIDE >>>

Where has this girl been all my life? Since 1981 she has been dead, but her art lives on - although I was never aware of it and probably few others were either until Ken Johnson's article about her appeared in the New York Times earlier this month.

Francesca Woodman was a young photographer barely out of college and beginning to make a name for herself. She took her own life at age 22.  It was at a time when another photographer, Cindy Sherman, was beginning to make a name for herself doing strange self-portraits. Woodman was doing similar work with haunting self-portraits and other images. She might have vanished from the art scene after her suicide but about five years later Ann Gabhart, director of the art museum at Wellesley College, discovered her work and arranged for a show, and now Woodman is having a major, posthumous retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.

Worldwide recognition 31 years after her death.

I saw her photographs online and was entranced. I searched further and found the Francesca Woodman Gallery online. Folks, I tell you, if you have any sensitivity to beauty and mystery and eroticism you can spend hours marveling at her photographs. If you're wealthy enough or lucky enough you can even go to New York and see the real thing. 

The Times described her photographs as "dreamy, formally playful and disarmingly erotic." Many of the photographs in the Guggenheim exhibition were done when she was a student at Rhode Island School of Design, and many of them are of herself, naked or partially naked, and were shot in an abandoned house in Providence, R.I.

She worked exclusively in black and white, and all of her prints are small. The images are often ghostly and surrealistic. Some have the look of medieval religious paintings transported into modern settings (there are many versions of one in which she hangs from a doorway like a naked crucifix). In many of them she appears lonely or afraid or angry. There are hints of sado-masochistic ritual. In many of her photographs the figure seems to be dissolving or melting into the wall or floor.

Most of the photos were taken indoors. The abandoned house in which she pictured herself (and the occasional model) was almost empty, but there were some furnishings and some ornate moldings. In some of the shots there is no figure - one of these that is particularly intriguing is a photo of an old door propped against a wall in a way that defies gravity.  There is also one of a bathtub with the most subtle of hints that there is someone in the tub. All we see is a diaphanous something reaching out of the tub. You have to take a second look to see that it is hair and that there is a head and a body attached to it.

In one of the few outdoor scenes Woodman's naked body floats in a stream mostly underwater and entangled in the roots of a tree as if sacrificed to some god of field and stream.

Mirror images and shadows are prominent, and the reflections and shadows appear as separate and malevolent figures. I get the feeling when looking at her photographs that I'm seeing a preview of her death. And maybe she didn't commit suicide after all; maybe she was killed by some otherworldly creature.

Woodman's photographs are not easy to look at, but they are beautiful in a strange and deathly way.

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