Francesca Woodman, “Space2, Providence, Rhode Island,” gelatin silver print, 1976 (© George and Betty Woodman)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through June 13, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

Tragically, Francesca Woodman’s story usually begins at the end: The innovative, influential photographer killed herself in 1981 at the age of twenty-two. But by that time she had already amassed an impressive, deeply personal collection of intimate, haunting photographs, something she began when she was just thirteen. The daughter of artists George and Betty Woodman, Francesca attended the Rhode Island School of Design, traveled to Rome and Athens, and moved to New York City during her short lifetime, all the while taking primarily black-and-white photographs in which her often nude body merges with both physical and psychological space, becoming part of the architecture as well as the ether. She huddles in a corner, disappears in a window, and covers parts of herself with detritus. Only hair and a bit of forehead are visible in a cast-iron bathtub. The lower half of her body sits over an impression of herself on a dusty floor. In an outdoor shot, she wears tree bark on her arms, transforming into part of the forest. And in one of her later works, a large-scale purplish diazotype, or blueprint, she poses as a caryatid, her arms covering her face. The retrospective also includes a half dozen recently discovered experimental videos that bring her photographic sensibility to life. Artists from Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman to Marina Abramović and Lucas Samaras feature themselves in their work, but in Woodman’s oeuvre, the artist is visible in a completely different way, trapped in a moment of space and time, the past, present, and future mysterious and uncertain. (Woodman’s “Blueprint for a Temple” is also part of the Met’s current “Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video” exhibition, and some of her later work was recently highlighted at a small but intriguing show at Marian Goodman.)

The tragic life of artist Francesca Woodman and her family is the focus of intriguing documentary (untitled photo by Francesca Woodman, 1977-78, Rome, courtesy Betty and George Woodman)

THE WOODMANS (C. Scott Willis, 2010)
Now available on DVD
www.kinolorber.com

There’s something inherently creepy about The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis’s documentary about an intriguing family of artists. For the first half of his debut theatrical release, Willis, an eleven-time Emmy winner who has spent most of his career working for television news organizations, speaks with successful ceramic sculptor Betty Woodman, who had a terrific retrospective at the Met in 2006; her less-well-known husband, painter and photographer George Woodman; and their son, video artist and professor Charles Woodman, focusing on the missing member of the family, photographer Francesca Woodman, who is heard from through excerpts from her diary and seen in her videos and photographs. For those who don’t know Francesca’s fate, Willis builds the tension like a mystery, although it’s obvious something awful occurred. The Woodmans gets even creepier once Willis reveals what happened to Francesca, a RISD grad who quickly made a name for herself in the late 1970s taking innovative and influential nude black-and-white photographs of herself. As the parents talk about their daughter’s life and career, Betty explains how she got pregnant more to experience childbirth than to actually be a nurturing mother, and George expresses his jealousy at how Francesca was so admired in the art world, outshining both her parents. That they tend to do so with a calm matter-of-factness contributes to the uncomfortable nature of the film.