The lyricism of Francesca Woodman

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Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Film

By Isabella Pedicini et al.

Gifted photographer Francesca Woodman committed suicide in New York at the age of 22. Implicitly and explicitly, Isabella Pedicini’s new book proposes that, had the young American photographer remained in Rome, she would have flourished – even if she did not achieve the kind of success that, for so many US artists, is conferred by ‘making it’ in New York. As a junior at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Woodman spent more than a year Italy, but this was after a lifetime of summering there with her artist-parents. Nonetheless, upon graduating, she no doubt felt primed for the career that American artists were beginning to envision as possible in those heady days of generous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the emergence of young urban professionals (yuppies).

But the background that had carried her to that point did not seem to work to Woodman’s advantage or, at least, didn’t seem to work quickly enough to confirm her ambitions. Little things went wrong and, after one unsuccessful attempt at suicide, Woodman jumped from a building to her death on the pavement below. She was 22 years old.

That was in 1981, more than 30 years ago, and the recognition that didn’t come quickly enough for Woodman during her life has been realized in the form of a film; a retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and just closed (in early June) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan; and several monographs, among them Pedicini’s marvellously readable, modestly scaled volume.

What is captivating about Pedicini’s book is that it so clearly renders the reasons why New York has only rather recently evinced enthusiasm for Woodman’s work. Foremost is that, despite her training at RISD – one of a few US schools offering an inside track to career advancement in studio art – Woodman was an outsider. Her roots in Colorado, coupled with her years of uncritical experience of Italian culture, endowed Woodman with an orientation quite apart from the conceptually based, cultural critique prevalent among emerging artists on the East Coast.

In other words, Woodman – and if it sounds a bit twee even now, imagine how it would have seemed circa 1980 – possessed a romantic vision based on engagement with nature and natural cycles of death and rebirth, and on metaphorical experience of those cycles in a place that had seen centuries of decay and regeneration. Woodman’s media, still photography and film, were contemporary but not her content in the context of late-1970s and early-1980s New York.

Woodman’s sincere lyricism stands in stark contrast with the over-determined works of Cindy Sherman – the name that cannot avoid being brought up in a discussion of Woodman’s oeuvre – Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons and other artists of the so-called Pictures Generation. Coming out of conceptual art and attempting to rationalize representation, Pictures Generation artists relied upon substantive theoretical devices in order to justify their return to  a focus on the human body. Their anti-humanist representation left Woodman’s poetic humanism in the dust.

What was irrelevant 30 years ago, however, slowly began to be received as refreshingly old school as cultural consumers found themselves craving authenticity. That does not make Woodman a naïf, a sort of Daisy Miller breathing in the vapours of a past she could not comprehend. Her images, which most often appear on the verge of dissolution, were carefully constructed and are akin to the surrealist works of René Magritte. She knew the effects she wanted to achieve and worked incessantly, as Pedicini reminds her readers, to bring them off.

The anarchistic intellectuals she met at the bookshop/gallery Libreria Maldoror in Rome helped Woodman hone her vision. Pedicini  argues that, fluent in Italian, she was able to engage them almost as muses. If that is so, then they inspired pictures that have frozen moments of encounter between what Pedicini recognizes as ‘flesh and film’. Woodman’s lovely young women seem to be melting under the eye of the camera that brings them before our eyes: they exist as blurs or as bits of well-turned ankles and shapely knees, loose tresses, graceful shoulders and swan-like necks—all in settings that, in themselves, display transformational decay.

Intimately proportioned and concisely edited, Pedicini’s book mixes her own essays with commentaries by other authors, including a written introduction by the British curator and photographer Gerald Badger and a visual essay by photographer Enrico Luzzi, who know Woodman in Rome. Reproductions of works by such diverse artists as Paul Outerbridge, Francis Bacon, Paul Gauguin and Claude Cahun situate Woodman’s imagery within Surrealism, but complementing some of Surrealism’s more virulent expressions of misogyny and pretentions towards automatism. It is a key contribution to Woodman’s legacy.

Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Film by Isabella Pedicini et al., is published by Contrasto, Rome, 2012. 136 pp. 6 colour and 22 mono illus. ISBN 978-88-6965-330-8