Francesca Woodman again sends forth her siren call, luring us in to puzzle out this puzzling girl. Only this time her haunting song—by turns enchanting, beguiling, slippery, and dangerous—is transatlantic, arising in both New York City, where Gagosian is celebrating its newly announced representation of the Woodman Family Foundation with the show “Francesca Woodman,” and London, where the National Portrait Gallery features her work in a joint exhibition with the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, “Portraits to Dream In,” opening on March 21.
Woodman was born into a family of artists in Boulder, Colorado. Her father, George, taught at the University of Colorado, and her mother, Betty, was a celebrated ceramist. It was within this intensely creative milieu that the precocious child with prodigious talent was hothoused into artistic understanding way beyond her years. At 13, her father gave her one of his cameras to take to boarding school, where she began taking photographs in earnest and quickly mastered the medium, shooting and, crucially, developing her work.
