The Art of Francesca Woodman: Haunting, Evocative, Personal

On January 9, 1981, at the age of 22, Francesca Woodman leapt to her death from the window of her New York apartment.

She did not leave a suicide note, but in a letter to her best friend written shortly before she died, she said,

“My life at this point is like very old coffee-cup sediment and I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, ie some work, my friendship with you, some other artefacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.” ¹

Born in April 1958 to George and Betty Woodman, both of whom are working artists themselves, the pressures on Francesca to become well-known and successful as an artist were enormous. After 22 short years of life and the production of approximately 800 images, ² it seemed that Woodman had succumbed to the stresses associated with breaking into the art world.

Though the sublimely gifted photographer’s early death is indeed tragic, this piece is not about her suicide, nor should others’ interpretations of her work be. While the inner demons that lead her to her death were most certainly a factor that influenced her art, viewers would be remiss to explicate her images through the lens of her early suicide.

However, like her work, Woodman herself also had a spectral quality. She passed through earthly life quickly and quietly, like a ghost, and her work is so puzzling and widely debated that she has almost become a phantom in the minds of others, as if she may not have existed at all. Woodman was not famous while she was alive, and the art world has almost mythologized her after her death.

Francesca Woodman: A Life

It is difficult not to read Woodman’s images as alluding to a troubled state of mind and containing autobiographical qualities. Regardless, those who appreciate Woodman’s photographs are often compelled to seek out biographical information, wondering “who was this mysterious, lost young woman?”

Francesca Woodman was born on April 3, 1958 in Boulder, Colorado to ceramicist Betty Woodman and painter/photographer George Woodman. ³ Her mother was Jewish, and her father was of Protestant heritage, but “the real family religion was art.” ⁴ Thus, “art was a morally as well as spiritually demanding calling for Francesca, one that she pursued with all the idealism and self-doubt of a hopelessly romantic teenager.” ⁵ Having artists for parents made success imperative for young Francesca, for whom obscurity was like a living hell.

Woodman attended a private boarding high school in Massachusetts, where she first began developing her artistic skills. She spent summers at her family’s home in Italy and began attending the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI in 1975. ⁶

“She was kooky, and at first I didn’t want to be anywhere near her,” Woodman’s friend Betsy Berne told Rachel Cooke of The Guardian. “We were in the same dorm, and I couldn’t get away from her. She seemed to have been born in the wrong century – she was totally outside pop culture; she never watched TV; she couldn’t have cared less about music. But if she wanted something, she was going to get it…she was very loyal and intense. She was the kind of person you either loved or hated.” ⁷

During her third year of college, she traveled to Rome as part of a RISD honors program before returning to America in 1978 and graduating. The following year, Woodman moved to New York City to pursue a career in photography. She began sending her portfolio out to professional photographers, with no success ⁸

She attempted suicide for the first time in the fall of 1980. She survived, received psychiatric treatment, and moved back in with her parents, who were also residing and working in Manhattan at the time. ⁹ Then, a grant application was denied, her bicycle was stolen, a romance went south, and Woodman’s parents suspect that she had stopped taking her medication. ¹⁰

Some have linked Woodman’s suicide to her failed grant application, but those who were close to Woodman dispute this.

“She had an illness: depression. That’s all there is to it,” said Betsy Berne. ¹¹

Self-Presentation and Interpretations

Woodman’s work consists mainly and most notably of ghostly self-portraits, most of which are nude, though she also experimented with angles formed by legs, pleated fabric, unhinged doors, window ledges, and the like. Her art is neurotic, clever, erotic, ironic, and in some cases, painfully honest. Some of her photographs even include playful visual jokes.

Critics can’t seem to agree on the meaning or purpose of her images. Some have compared her to surrealist photographers like Man Ray, while others, like American critic Rosalind Krauss, have hailed her as a feminist hero who was “exploring the ways in which women are forced to conceal and disguise their true selves.” ¹² Her images are also deeply personal, lending them an autobiographical quality, which is why their interpretation is often based on psychoanalysis and colored by her suicide.

While Woodman’s images are, ostensibly, self-presentation, many would argue that she is not their sole subject, that there is a larger purpose that isn’t quite so obvious.

Some young people feel that her images are universal in nature, describing the struggles of growing up and finding oneself. They believe that her work is talking about them.

Others feel that the artist herself and her desire to disappear are the driving force behind the work.

It is difficult to fully understand Woodman’s art, which is rich in symbolism that the artist did not live long enough to explain (or perhaps even to totally comprehend herself). All we truly have as viewers and admirers are a brief biography, some critical guesswork, and how these images make us feel.

Her evocative photographs are best appreciated with a focus on the latter.

Seduced

Woodman’s images are gently erotic rather than frankly pornographic, making them seductive without soliciting a sexual relationship with the viewer.

The more I look at her work, the more Woodman seems like a long lost lover, one whose curves I have known time and time again but who evokes loving memories rather than lustful ones. As I focus more closely on each individual image, I feel as though I am holding her in my arms. But if I linger for too long, she slips away again like a shadow into shade.

Indeed, Francesca Woodman was beautiful, although not unbelievably so, and she was more than just a pretty girl who used her looks to produce work that people would want to look at.

Francesca once told her told her parents that self-inclusion in her art was a matter of “convenience.” She was always available to herself, whereas finding a model and prompting her to look and stand and sit every which way could waste a lot of time and would not ensure achievement of the desired effect. ¹³

In some images, Woodman pairs seduction with humor, irony, or brutal honesty to beguile viewers. It is those images that showcase Woodman’s technical skill and compositional talent. She had creative ideas the likes of which one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

Viewers of all sorts are drawn to her work, even if they have never seen it before. It is seductive because she is beautiful while still leaving much to the imagination, because she is an enigma whose incredible young talent we don’t quite understand, because she is a suicide and, to be frank, we all want to die sometimes.

Amused

Though many interpret Francesca’s images with the idea that they’re all about death and disappearance, Betty Woodman has denounced this explication as a “basic fallacy.” ¹⁴ Woodman’s lighthearted sense of humor is apparent in her work, which is interspersed with witty titles, playful visual jokes, and oddly funny subject matter. The generous helping of humor in her work is often baffling to those who view her art through an autobiographical lens. Clearly, this young woman was in a dark place when she produced these images, so what purpose does this jocularity serve and where did it come from?

Many of Woodman’s funny images were showcased in the Zigzag exhibition, which was shown in Victoria Miro, Mayfair in 2014. ¹⁵

She has delighted viewers with such images as a fingerless pair of “gloves” made from tree bark and modeled with her own hands, a disembodied pair of legs mirroring a charred v-shaped groove in the ground where she “fell to earth,” and a face and hand peeking out from beneath a tablecloth and surrounded by silverware at lunchtime.

Some of her images pair wit and irony with spooky aspects to produce an odd, dark humor. Others are so subtle in their humor that viewers may not recognize them as funny at first.

It is these nuances that make Woodman’s art deeply multi-faceted. Those who seek to pigeonhole all of her images into one particular explication often find pieces that do not fit into their theory.

This is what makes the work so complex.

Haunted

Perhaps the most apparent aspect of Woodman’s images is a haunting, ghostly quality.

Many of her photographs were taken using a slow shutter speed, meaning that the camera captured her movements, which made her appear as a blur. ¹⁶ As a result, her “concealed figures” ¹⁷ are reminiscent of ghosts or corpses, and many of her images seem to have been taken by a camera that was left in the presence of specters in a haunted house or a graveyard. There are no modern buildings in her work, only crumbling, dust-covered ruins “whose disintegrating forms evoke the wrecks admired by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic revivalists often cited as [some of Woodman’s] major influences.” ¹⁸ The delicate grays that shade her images are wispy, as well, adding to the haunted tone and showing the artist’s keen eye for light, shadow, and form.

In some of her works produced during her time as a RISD student, her entire form appears as fog, moving through tombstones and evaporating inside of fireplaces. Woodman referred to this series as “ghost pictures.” ¹⁹ In others, Woodman’s surroundings emit a strange, ethereal light, seeming to give off otherworldly energy.

At first glance, her images seem deathly, even funeral, which has led some to interpret her work as the product of a lifetime of anticipating her untimely disappearance.

Or perhaps it is the visual style of a feminist photographer.

Regardless of how this aspect of her work is interpreted, there is no escaping how the images are bound to haunt viewers, as if leading them prematurely into the afterlife.

Legacy

Woodman’s art was introduced to the public in 1986, and it immediately attracted a great deal of attention. ²⁰ Since then, her potency has only grown over time, and she has attracted a large following, particularly among young people. Some have even thought of her art as “a girl’s visual equivalent of Catcher in the Rye.” ²¹ Her work has also been appreciated by major art critics, and famous photographers like Cindy Sherman have cited her work as an influence on their own. ²² Though only a quarter of the 800 images that Woodman produced over her lifetime have been viewed by the public ²³, her work has seen all of the critical acclaim and public success that Woodman could have hoped for while she was alive…and then some.

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