epitaph
Remembering Betty Woodman (1930–2018) by Patterson Sims
Betty Woodman in her studio in New York, 2014. Courtesy Stefano Porcinai and Salon 94, New York.
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I first met Betty Woodman in 1980, just as she had begun to push beyond her prodigious gift for making functional pottery, a talent that she discovered at 16 and that flowered during her subsequent study at the School of American Craftsmen in Alfred, New York, where she made her first humble, useful, “official” piece: a custard cup. I had become a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and I thought of her work back then—in the days before the contemporary art world finally woke up to the deeply human importance of pottery and of the medium of clay—as a guilty pleasure. In 1980, Betty and her husband, the writer, painter and, later, photographer George Woodman (1932–2017) bought a loft on West 17th Street in Manhattan. It was, as I learned (somewhat to my amazement, because they weren’t wealthy), their third place. They also had a house in Boulder, Colorado, and a converted former Tuscan farm property in Bagno a Ripoli, outside Florence. A mutual friend, knowing my admiration for Betty’s work, arranged an invitation for tea on 17th Street—the first of visits that grew beyond count. Those times at the loft always included something delicious served on Betty’s handmade pottery or on pieces she loved that were made by others; she maintained an almost moral conviction that living with and using beautiful objects every day improved one’s life. Preparing meals for her family and friends and sharing them on a colorfully adorned table remained a lifelong creative act, a fundamental pleasure for her and those lucky enough to be in her circle. The Woodmans’ tripartite existence was a defining quality of their lives for, as Betty explained, “the physical and emotional part of moving, packing, leaving and arriving, and then stopping, pushed me very hard” and “encouraged constant experimentation and pushing definitions.” After the addition of the New York City loft, their base remained
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in Boulder, where they taught at the University of Colorado and raised their son and daughter. As they had since the late 1960s, they continued to spend long academic summers in Italy, at their farmhouse, which was situated a hair-raising drive above the town of Antella. In the distance, the glorious panorama of Florence could be seen, with Brunelleschi’s dome a crowning facet in a 180-degree view, most of which appeared virtually and verdantly unchanged from 15th century paintings of the Tuscan landscape. From the late 1960s on, and even more so after 1998, when they stopped teaching and sold their Colorado house, Betty was as much a European as an American artist. She was especially grounded in the history of Italian painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, but keeping one foot in New York, she told me, was essential for seeing how both she and “clay, in my hands, could be a participant in the art discussions of the day.” She could sense how those discussions were changing as the arc of contemporary art bent ever so slowly in her direction and that of artists like her, many of them women, working in ceramics and other forms long dismissed as craft. “All materials became acceptable for making art,” as she said. “And the use of pattern and decoration and overt pursuit of ‘beauty’ in art were being taken seriously.” In 1981, Betty and George’s daughter, Francesca, committed suicide at the age of 22. Her death profoundly transformed her parents’ lives and intensified their dedication to making art and friends. They seldom spoke of Francesca in the past tense, which was both a powerful way to lessen the pain of her death and to make her vividly present for all of us who spent time with them. Few parents who experience a child’s death have the solace of the kind of feverish creativity that Francesca left behind in her own work, and George and Betty worked diligently to bring
her powerful vision in photographs, short videos and writing to international cultural attention—a difficult job that meant managing Francesca’s fame even as they mourned her and pursued their own busy lives as artists and professors. The Woodmans existed fundamentally as a family of artists; their son, Charlie, became a gifted artist and an art professor as well, making video work often in collaboration with dancers, composers, and musicians. The entire family was driven by a potent drive to create, possessed by an ambition that was most emphatically evident in Betty. With clay, she had chosen a borderless medium in use since the dawn of human creativity. Magpie-like, she eagerly annexed everything that she found useful from art history and from her extensive travels, building on a foundation of the dual allure of function and beauty. Vases and platters, the swirling oval building blocks of so many of her larger works, remained at the core of her art throughout her life, and to her gratification and wonder, she watched as these forms gained a following. The metaphorical and professional distance from her twice-a-year sales of plates, casseroles, and cups during the early years in Boulder to the resplendent “Theatre of the Domestic,” her 2016 survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, was probably difficult even for her to encompass. That exhibition and other European museum shows following her 2006 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art— the museum’s first-ever retrospective of a living female sculptor in clay— unequivocally declared her art’s impact and import, as well as its unalloyed joy. (Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker, described her 2001–06 Aeolian Pyramid, a 35-part vase installation at the Met, as “a visual ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus.”) Despite the tolls of aging, Betty seldom discussed her health. She maintained a nonstop work and travel
She maintained an almost moral conviction that living with and using beautiful objects every day improved one’s life.