Francesca Woodman was only 22 years old when she put an end to her life. I am reluctant to charge her images by this doleful fact, because this is so much part of the cliché of the suffering genius, and a corny mystification of the prosaic job of working as an artist.
There is nothing romantic about mental or material misery, and there is nothing romantic about a deadly jump out of a window.
Yet I am driven to connect her fate to her images. Just as I am trying to fathom the inner logic of my life, I am trying to find out about the biographical logic of her suicide, and I am looking for a tortured soul mirrored in her artwork.
I am searching for meaning,
I am trying to find a leitmotif,
I am looking for a clue.
No answers, nowhere.
I don’t know what the “gestalt” of an angel has meant to Francesca Woodman.
I can’t know, where the road she started on would have led her.
She has been very gifted young person.
You will find more of her photographshere.
