Untitled (La Mémoire du corps) (The Memory of the Body) 1993

This drawing is one of many where Betty Goodwin has stripped the body to its skeletal remains. Here, her reductive depiction of bones is accompanied by a small independent drawing of a figure taped beside her primary subject as if in an afterthought to evoke the departed spirit or reclaim the body that once existed. Barely there, this diminutive body was clearly an important addition for Goodwin and attests to the typically additive nature of her process as she conceived of the final work. The tiny figure appears to be simultaneously in stages of struggle and release, somewhere between flailing upward against gravity and floating, a posture that recalls her Swimmers series, 1982–88, as well as the floating figures found as early as the 1960s in her notebooks as she developed a corporeal vocabulary for expressing states of being.

In 1993, with the AIDS crisis having already reached epidemic proportions, Goodwin, grieving the death of her beloved assistant Marcel Lemyre (1948–1991) from illness related to the disease, began to focus on the body. After seeing Lemyre through inexorable decline and then losing him, she turned inward, writing in an undated document of this period, “In serious illness as the body is wasting, the bones become apparent under a frail, translucent skin—an image which is the point of departure for this series of drawings.”  The memory of the body resides in bones. The skeletal structure endures as other traces of existence disappear. Goodwin struggled again to make palpable a sense of loss and absence that had always haunted her work, though in this piece she no longer seeks the dense materiality that often characterized the body in her drawings. Rather, an intimate and translucent lightness characterizes this spare drawing of rib bones isolated on a large sheet of paper. The bare, almost fugitive quality of the image and the rudimentary descriptive lines she uses embody the transience of our existence.

Goodwin gave the same title, La Mémoire du corps (The Memory of the Body), to a diverse range of works during this period, among them pieces offering images of a bathtub and a stark metal bed, each conjuring intimate associations with the body. These images were derived from photographs illustrating an article saved by Goodwin featuring the asylum where Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was confined. Goodwin was reaching for different ways to express the absence of the body. In many of these pieces, she had the photographs enlarged and printed on Mylar, in contrast to the lightness of this drawing, and drew over them with layers of oil stick, wax, translucent washes, and charcoal to accentuate the forlorn presence of empty beds and baths. Throughout the series titled La Mémoire du corps, 1990–95, Goodwin demonstrated again a tremendous ability to go deeper, to burrow as she would say, layering her methods until she arrived at effects that were materially and metaphorically forceful enough to match her emotional investment in the subjects that compelled her.