A year before her death in January 1981, Francesca Woodman was hard at work on her most ambitious project, “The Blueprint for the Temple.” More than 14 feet tall, the soft-focus blue collage transformed several of her girlfriends into sculptural caryatids and combined the tile work of a dilapidated New York home with the grandeur of ancient Greece.
This large-scale work, constructed from a diazotype, a cheap type of copier used primarily for architectural and technical drawings, was exhibited at the now-defunct Alternative Museum in downtown New York in 1980.
Francesca's parents, artists George and Betty Woodman, donated “The Blueprint of the Temple” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001, where it was displayed in a group exhibition in 2012. The deaths of both her parents led to the discovery of an overlooked bag containing 24 rolled-up diazotypes and four gelatin silver prints.
When Lissa McClure, Executive Director of the Woodman Family Foundation, and Katarina Jerinic, Collections Curator, unpacked the book in the summer of 2022, they realized what they discovered: Another version of Woodman's crowning achievement is “Blueprint for a Temple (II).” No one even thought about looking for it because no one even knew it existed. It was another mystery of life that raised more questions than answers.
Although George and Betty apparently believed otherwise, the documents confirmed that the overlooked “Temple Blueprint (II)” was not a work owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but rather a work on display at an alternative museum. It's looser, less polished, and more conceptual and experimental than previously known iterations. On one side of the taped and stapled diazotype that made up the temple, Woodman attached photographic prints and hand-annotated diagrams to show how the collage was made. Gagosian's “Blueprint for a Temple (II),” which was just beginning to represent the artist's estate, takes pride of place in the “Francesca Woodman” show, which includes more than 50 lifetime prints.
For Woodman, the “temples,” as she casually called them, were a radical departure from the small black-and-white gelatin silver prints she had previously produced, which often depicted her own body in the nude. “She wanted to get away from her intimate personal affairs,” McClure said in an interview. Diazo-type collages opened new doors for the 22-year-old's suicide.
This is an auspicious time for Woodman. She is currently paired with Julia Margaret Cameron in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Last year, her reputation was enhanced by the publication of a lavish facsimile edition of eight volumes of artist's notes, created by adding photographs and scrawled captions to address books, ledgers and textbooks from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Like a comet, she burned out quickly, leaving behind a trail of gratitude after her death. I sometimes think of Edwin Mullhouse, the novelist protagonist in Steven Millhauser's mock literary biography. He comes under intense critical scrutiny after his death on his 11th birthday. If an artist's career spans about six years and includes numerous student assignments, what does it mean to classify 'period'?
Her early death inevitably raises speculation about what she might have achieved, but Woodman developed a distinctive style and explored recurring themes during her short life. The centerpiece Gagosian show was structured to reveal one of those running lines: her obsession with the body as sculpture.
In two “Blueprints for Temples” collages, Woodman arranges diazotypes of female figures wearing caryatid-like pleated dresses supporting the entablature of the south portico of the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis of Athens. I did. But in early 1976, when Woodman was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, she had already taken a picture of a bare leg, smooth and white as a marble column, firmly planted on a pine plank floor and juxtaposed with a piece of torn wallpaper. Probably around the same time, at her Providence, she depicted her own nude body for her triptych of pictures in an upright posture similar to the one she later used in her “Her Temple”.
During her junior year in Rome in 1977-8, surrounded by classical artifacts she knew well, partly from her childhood in Italy, she painted a portrait of her friend in a polka-dot dress, standing upright like a pillar between them. the pillar on which she looks up at her statue; And once again, in her museum, she photographed a nude corpse, probably her own, from behind, lying next to a crumpled sheet on the floor beneath a plinth that may have once supported the fallen figure.
With the indifference of a young man untouched by the ravages of time, Woodman romanticized corruption. She adopted Diazo type because it offered a cheap and fast way to create large prints and create impressive pieces, she said. (The two “temple blueprints” are each more than 14 feet tall.) But she also seems to have been attracted to their fragility. Without modern conservation efforts to stabilize them, the diazomorphs would soon deteriorate upon exposure to light.
The basic conceit of the “Blueprint for a Temple” project arose from Woodman's observation that Greek key motifs frequently appeared on the tile floors and carved claws of old bathrooms and hallways in East Village apartments he saw in New York last year. In the bathtub. She wrote that she liked the “tension” between the building blocks and the image of the temple, which was derived from the “ordinariness of the everyday bathroom.”
There is also a tension between the dreamy, hazy photographs Woodman creates and the harder truths beneath them. Her notable predecessor was the French Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, who created groundbreaking self-portraits before World War II. Cahun, a gender-transitioning lesbian who today might identify as non-binary, declared: “Masculine? effeminate? It depends. “Androgynous has always been the only gender that suits me.”
It is unclear whether Woodman knew Cahun. But like Cahoon, she often photographed herself nude, cornered and crammed in her cupboards, dramatizing the ways in which her human body, especially the female body, was positioned and replaced. Both acknowledged and publicly rejected the conventions that bound women in society, and both celebrated their (very different) sexual orientation with surprising openness and unique flair. They combined the mundane and the mythical. Little known during their lifetime, today they are known as prophets and revered as cult figures.
Francesca Woodman
Through April 27, Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, Manhattan; (212) 741-1111; gagosian.com.