George Woodman

The American artist George Woodman is a ceramicist, painter, and photographer. [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE7DB163CF934A15751C1A967958260 Hagen, Charles. Art in review.] "New York Times", December 27, 1991. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n2_v86/ai_20333141 Budney, Jen. George Woodman at Palazzo Pitti.] "Art in America", February 1998. Accessed 2007-08-19.] Paglia, Michael. Patterns that connect. "Denver Westword", April 23, 1998.]

Biography

Woodman was born in 1932. He went to Harvard University and married Betty Woodman (the former Elizabeth Abrahams) in 1953. [http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/art/article/0,2777,DRMN_23958_4640893,00.html Chandler, Mary Voelz. Met exhibit honors artist's feats of clay: Betty Woodman taught in Boulder.] "Rocky Mountain News", April 22, 2006. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_10_94/ai_n17113305/print Duncan, Michael. Woodman's decorative impulse: shown in a recent retrospective at the Metropolitan, Betty Woodman's spirited ceramic works embrace theatricality and modernist fragmentation.] "Art in America", November 2006. Accessed 2007-08-19.] After earning a master's degree in painting at the University of New Mexico, he taught painting and art criticism at the University of Colorado at Boulder until 1996. The Woodmans moved to New York in 1980 and have a second home in Italy where they have spent their summers. [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/15/060515craw_artworld Schjeldahl, Peter. Decoration myths: Betty Woodman’s ceramics.] "New Yorker", May 15, 2006. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://www.plexus.org/review/perreault/woodman.html Perreault, John. Betty Woodman: The Joys of Negative Space (review).] "Plexus", January 1997. Accessed 2007-08-19.]

The Woodmans' son Charles was born in 1955 and became Associate Professor of Electronic Art at the University of Cincinnati. [ [http://www.shirley-jonesgallery.com/exhibit8.html Video works Charles Woodman, photographs Francesca Woodman, May 6 - June 16, 2005.] Notes for an exhibition at Shirley-Jones Gallery, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://www.daap.uc.edu/people/profiles/woodmac Charles Woodman page at University of Cincinnati.] Accessed 2007-08-19.] Their daughter was the photographer Francesca Woodman; she was born in 1958 and committed suicide in 1981. George Woodman selected some of his daughter's journal entries for publication in the book "Francesca Woodman" edited by Chris Townsend (Phaidon, 2006). [ [http://www.phaidon.com/Default.aspx/Web/francesca-woodman-9780714844305 Publisher's page for book "Francesca Woodman".] Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/3544/book-review-francesca-woodman.html Fredrickson, Lori. Book review: "Francesca Woodman".] "Popular Photography", January 2007. Accessed 2007-08-19.]

Ceramics

Until the early 1970s, George Woodman painted the ceramic work of Betty Woodman. His own ceramic art includes a 1991 tile mural "Ode to the West Wind" in the Temple Buell Theater in Denver, Colorado [Rosen, Steven. Buell Theatre artist guilty of 'padding.' "Denver Post", October 27, 1991.] Chandler, Mary Voelz. Work that fits a timeless pattern. "Rocky Mountain News", March 15, 1998.] [ [http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/239/documents/Public%20Art.pdf Denver Office of Cultural Affairs. Public art guide to downtown Denver.] Accessed 2007-08-19.] and a 2004 tile mural "Path Games" at the Detroit People Mover's Renaissance Center Station. [cite book | author=Walt, Irene | title=Art in the Stations: the Detroit People Mover | publisher=Detroit: Art in the Stations | year=2004 | id=ISBN 0974539201] [ [http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/3936466/detail.html Final People Mover link opens Monday.] WDIV Detroit, November 20, 2004. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20041119004505/http://www.freep.com/news/locway/mover17e_20041117.htm Bullock, Lorinda. Tile art reborn: People Mover stop to reopen at RenCen.] "Detroit Free Press", November 17, 2004. Accessed 2007-08-19.]

Painting

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Woodman's artistic output consisted largely of colorful oil paintings on canvas.McGraw, Hesse. Obscura lessons: Woodman's large-scale photographs teach plenty old, but not much new. "Kansas City Star", May 7, 2004.] His earliest paintings in the 1950s to the early 1960s were landscapes. [http://omahacityweekly.com/article.php?id=3040 Krainak, Michael Joe. ‘Visual Legacy’: Bemis Center retrospect celebrates 40 years of Woodman paintings.] "Omaha City Weekly", March 7, 2007. Accessed 2007-08-19.] In the early 1960s, he painted abstract works "with heavy, painterly brush strokes," but by the mid-1960s "the paint was applied thinly and evenly" in his abstracts. In the 1970s, as a mentor of the Colorado Criss-Cross artists' cooperative, Woodman was associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement. [http://www.grandarts.com/exhibits/GWoodman.html Princenthal, Nancy. George Woodman: the camera obscura photographs, March 26 - May 8, 2004.] Notes for an exhibition at Grand Arts, Kansas City, Missouri. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_2_92/ai_113232707/print Miles, Christopher. Tracking patterns: a recent septet of pattern and decoration exhibitions at Bergamot Station prompts a reconsideration of that once burgeoning but lately little discussed movement.] "Art in America", February 2004. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/arts/design/28wood.html Glueck, Grace. Betty Woodman, turning the humble vase into high art.] "New York Times", April 28, 2006. Accessed 2007-08-19 (registration required).] His paintings have been exhibited in at least two solo shows: "Sensuality in a World of Reason" in 1998 and "George Woodman: Paintings 1960-2000” in 2007. [ [http://www.bemiscenter.org/art/index.html?req=calendar/event&eventUniqID=5779-0--&month=1&day=1&year=2007&PHPSESSID=f5afc Gallery Talk: George Woodman.] Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska, March 3, 2007. Accessed 2007-08-19.]

Photography

Since the early 1980s, Woodman has concentrated on black-and-white photography. The photographs in a 1991 New York exhibition were described as having an "antique, romantic air," with a "reliance on images from art history." In 1998, the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy, displayed 78 of Woodman's "highly constructed" photographs that were "based on its own collection." The 1998 exhibition "Sensuality in a World of Reason" included multiple-exposure photographs with overlapping human figures, buildings, and sculptures. A 2002 exhibition in Chennai, India, which was entitled "Truths and Fictions," included Woodman's photographs of photographs. [ [http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/01/31/stories/2002013100070200.htm Sathish, Swapna. Play of images.] "The Hindu", January 31, 2002. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2002/05/12/stories/2002051200110200.htm Natarajan, Shankar. Aura of photography.] "The Hindu", May 12, 2002. Accessed 2007-08-19.] [ [http://www.hindu.com/mag/2003/11/23/stories/2003112300030200.htm Raman, Aparna. 'Schizophreniart.'] "The Hindu", November 23, 2003. Accessed 2007-08-19.] His large-format, black-and-white, still life camera obscura photographs were exhibited in 2004; they involved techniques such as collage-like arrangements, long exposures with movement of objects, and combinations of positive and negative images. However, the photographs in the 2004 exhibition were criticized as "a sexist, objectified gaze unwisely and nostalgically paired with images and artifacts from the Western canon."

Footnotes

For further reading

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