The Unseen Sides of Francesca Woodman
Francesca Woodman did not come by her artistic precocity by accident. Her father, George, was an abstract painter. Her mother, Betty, was a ceramicist. Both made clear to Francesca that art was worth situating at the center of life. During the summers, the family would retreat to a house in the Tuscan countryside and make trips to see the works of the Florentine masters. While her parents performed their own acts of artistic devotion, Francesca was allowed to roam the museums alone, and came back with sketchbooks full of women in elaborate gowns, copied from court paintings centuries old. Her older brother, Charles, had juvenile diabetes, which was comparatively dangerous and rare in the nineteen-sixties. “It created a kind of family dynamic where there was always attention and control on...
